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What It’s Like to Be a Dog

THE IDEA OF SCANNING DOGS’ BRAINS didn’t occur to me all at once. As with most scientific developments, it started as a series of random thoughts and inferences that eventually led to an aha moment. While Newton’s death planted the seed of an idea, it was my own discomfort around groups of people that helped it grow.

For the past fifteen years, my lab has used brain-scanning technology to understand how the human reward system works. The main tool that we use is magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. About the size of a car, an MRI scanner is pretty much a large tube wrapped in miles of wire. When electricity is sent through the wire, it creates a powerful magnetic field that can be used to see inside of a person’s brain. A standard MRI, like what you would get if you went to a hospital, takes a picture of your brain. Scientists soon discovered that if you took several pictures of the brain in rapid fire, you could see the brain in action. This is called functional MRI, or fMRI, and it opened the black box of the human mind. With fMRI, we can measure activity inside the brain while a person is actually doing something, like reading or doing math or even while experiencing different types of emotions. This allows scientists to figure out how the brain actually works (hence the functional in fMRI).

As the leader of a research lab, it is one of my duties to hold an annual lab party. You would think that this would be an enjoyable activity. Inevitably it is a source of stress in our household. The dogs don’t help either.

Like me, the dogs were never properly socialized to large groups of people, something for which I take full blame. Since we don’t have parties often, it seemed unreasonable to make the dogs learn how to behave in such situations. Nevertheless, one cannot completely abdicate these social necessities, as with our once-a-year gathering of lab members.

Ignoring my antipathy, Kat and the girls threw themselves into the preparations for the annual party. They brought all the chairs out of the dining room and created a semicircular seating arrangement in the family room. Nothing unusual about this, presuming that the guests are able adults who can manage conversation while eating and drinking without tables to place their food upon. It does not, however, account for dogs either underfoot, in the case of Callie, or swishing big, fluffy tails around, in the case of Lyra.

If everyone was a dog person, these parties wouldn’t present a problem. In recent years, I have certainly become more selective in allowing people to work in the lab, and this includes my asking whether he or she is a dog person or, second best, a cat person. But can you really trust someone who doesn’t have a pet? Despite my best efforts to fill the lab with animal lovers, I have no control over spouses and partners.

Kat wanted to lock Lyra and Callie in the bedroom when the guests arrived. The dogs weren’t accustomed to being locked up, so I feigned ignorance and let them have free run of the party. As guests arrived, Callie would give a perfunctory woof. Lyra just grinned and wagged her tail excessively as the people filed in.

I could trust the dog people in the lab to keep an eye on the dogs and prevent them from swiping food, so I slipped out to help Kat in the kitchen. She was dishing up the hors d’oeuvres and pouring drinks. The team, while diverse in terms of background, was predominantly American, with the exception of one lab member from India. It was at the moment I stepped into the kitchen when he arrived with his wife.

Their entrance was marked in dramatic fashion by an ear-piercing “Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee!”

I rushed out of the kitchen. My colleague’s wife, wrapped in a lovely sari, had backed herself into a corner, shrieking like a bird at the mere sight of the dogs.

This behavior baffled Callie, so she paid no further notice to her and moved on to look for food droppings. Lyra, on the other hand, found these vocalizations highly stimulating. She tracked right to the sound and starting jumping up and down and barking in what appeared to me to be a request to play. But the grimace of terror on the woman’s face indicated no such desire.

I grabbed Lyra by the collar and led her to the bedroom.

“Sorry, girl. You can’t play tonight.”

What did Lyra think was the reason that woman was screaming? If Lyra were a person, I could have simply asked her. How else could I find out what was going through her mind?

To truly know what a dog is thinking, you would have to be a dog.

The question of what a dog is thinking is actually an old metaphysical debate, which has its origins in Descartes’s famous saying cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am.” Our entire human experience exists solely inside our heads. Photons may strike our retinas, but it is only through the activity of our brains that we have the subjective experience of seeing a rainbow or the sublime beauty of a sunset over the ocean. Does a dog see those things? Of course. Do they experience them the same way? Absolutely not.

When Lyra was jumping and barking at the woman wrapped in purple, with a red dot on her forehead, Lyra experienced the same things at a primitive level that I did. Purple. Red. Screaming. Those are the sensory primitives. They originate in photons bouncing off dyes, pressure waves in the air around the woman’s vocal cords. But my brain interprets those events one way and Lyra’s brain another.

Observing Lyra’s behavior doesn’t tell us what she was thinking. From past experience, I knew that Lyra barked and jumped in response to different things. She barks when we’re eating. In that context, a natural assumption would be that she wants food too. But she also barks after dropping a tennis ball at my feet. I had no comparable frame of reference for what had attracted her to the screaming woman that night at the party.

The question of what it is like to be a dog could be approached from two very different perspectives. The hard approach asks the question: What is it like for a dog to be a dog? If we could do that, then all the questions about why a dog behaves the way it does would become clear. The problem with being a dog, though, is that we would have no language to describe what we felt. The best we can do is ask the related, but substantially easier question: What would it be like for us to be a dog?

By imagining ourselves in the skin of another animal, we can recast questions of behavior into their human equivalent. The question of why Lyra harassed the party guest becomes: If I were Lyra, why would I bark at that woman? Framed that way, we can form all sorts of speculations for dog behavior.

Many authors have written about the dog mind, and some have even attempted to answer the types of questions I have posed. I will not review this vast literature. I will, however, point out that much of it is based on two potentially flawed assumptions—both stemming from the paradox of getting into a dog’s mind without actually being a dog.

The first flaw comes from the human tendency to anthropomorphize, or project our own thoughts and feelings onto things that aren’t ourselves. We can’t help it. Our brains are hardwired to project our thoughts onto other people. This is called mentalizing, and it is critical for human social interactions. People are able to interact with each other only because they are constantly guessing what other people are thinking. The brevity of text messages, for example, and the fact that we are able to communicate with less than 140 characters at a time work because people maintain mental models of each other. The actual linguistic content of most text exchanges is minimal. And because humans have common elements of culture, we tend to react in fairly similar ways. For example, if I watch a movie that makes me sad, I can use my own reaction to intuit that the people sitting around me are feeling the same way. I could even start a conversation with a complete stranger based on our shared experience, using my own thoughts as a starting point. But dogs are not the same as humans, and they certainly don’t have a shared culture like we do. There is no avoiding the fact that when we observe dog behavior, we view it through the filter of the human mind. Unfortunately, much of dog literature says more about the human writer than the dog.