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A review by divapitbull
How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain by Gregory Berns
2.0
I think I would have been happier just reading the scientific paper; there really wasn't enough material here to justify writing a book. The conclusions that the research reached were gratifying in that they substantiated what any "dog person" already knows; but they were also superfluous in that a real "dog person" doesn't need research to tell them what in their minds is plainly evident.
The book spends allot of time, attention and detail discussing the process by which the dogs were trained to undergo an MRI. I would have been happy with one sentence "we used positive reinforcement to gradually shape the needed behavior for the dog to enter and hold still in the MRI and to acclimate to a pair of earmuffs to protect their sensitive hearing during the scanning process". End of story. Anyone who is really a "dog person" has a basic idea as to how the training was accomplished. Anyone who really isn't a "dog person" probably isn't all that interested.
The first experiment concluded that while the caudate activation in the dogs' brains shows that they transfer the meaning of a hand signal to something rewarding like hotdogs, the other brain regions activating point toward a theory of mind. Even if dogs have only a rudimentary theory of mind that would mean they might have about the same level of consciousness as a young child. It's nice to have this validated by science, but it's also something that the real "dog person" simply inherently knows (and will not accept otherwise).
The second experiment looked at how dogs responded to familiar and unfamiliar scents of humans and dogs. It concluded that only one type of smell activated the caudate (same as the signal for hotdogs did) and that is the scent of a familiar human. This suggests that dogs have a sense of permanence for the people in their households. They know who their family is and remember them, even when they aren't physically there - and the remembrance is a positive one - or at least in this case it was (perhaps the canine version of love). The "dog person" in me needs to point out that this also falls under the umbrella of "as plain as the nose on your face"; and the positive remembrance only goes so far in that it is deserved. Dogs don't like people who treat them badly.
In summary I thought the book contained too little actual research and too much attention to tedious detail. The anecdotal and personal information shared wasn't riveting enough to warrant it's inclusion. I really wanted to like this book more than I did, but truth is I found it more that a little boring.
The book spends allot of time, attention and detail discussing the process by which the dogs were trained to undergo an MRI. I would have been happy with one sentence "we used positive reinforcement to gradually shape the needed behavior for the dog to enter and hold still in the MRI and to acclimate to a pair of earmuffs to protect their sensitive hearing during the scanning process". End of story. Anyone who is really a "dog person" has a basic idea as to how the training was accomplished. Anyone who really isn't a "dog person" probably isn't all that interested.
The first experiment concluded that while the caudate activation in the dogs' brains shows that they transfer the meaning of a hand signal to something rewarding like hotdogs, the other brain regions activating point toward a theory of mind. Even if dogs have only a rudimentary theory of mind that would mean they might have about the same level of consciousness as a young child. It's nice to have this validated by science, but it's also something that the real "dog person" simply inherently knows (and will not accept otherwise).
The second experiment looked at how dogs responded to familiar and unfamiliar scents of humans and dogs. It concluded that only one type of smell activated the caudate (same as the signal for hotdogs did) and that is the scent of a familiar human. This suggests that dogs have a sense of permanence for the people in their households. They know who their family is and remember them, even when they aren't physically there - and the remembrance is a positive one - or at least in this case it was (perhaps the canine version of love). The "dog person" in me needs to point out that this also falls under the umbrella of "as plain as the nose on your face"; and the positive remembrance only goes so far in that it is deserved. Dogs don't like people who treat them badly.
In summary I thought the book contained too little actual research and too much attention to tedious detail. The anecdotal and personal information shared wasn't riveting enough to warrant it's inclusion. I really wanted to like this book more than I did, but truth is I found it more that a little boring.