How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (5 page)

Lisa’s most endearing feature was what she referred to as her birth defect. It was more like a mannerism. Whenever Lisa listened intently to someone talking, she would wrinkle her eyebrows in a Spock-like expression. Most people interpreted this as a sign of confusion. Since Lisa was a social person who listened to a lot of people, some people concluded she was perpetually confused.

But Lisa was never confused when it came to dogs. She was head over heels in love with her two-year-old goldendoodle, Sheriff. Sheriff was a big, goofy dog. Larger than both a standard poodle and a golden retriever, he was imposing until he opened his mouth in a grin that broadcast,
I love you, whoever you are
.

After everyone had seen the pictures of the military dogs, the group settled in around the central table.

“If dogs can be trained to jump out of helicopters,” I began, “then surely they can be trained to go into an MRI.”

Andrew nodded. Lisa’s eyebrows crinkled up.

Gavin Ekins was the first to ask the obvious question: “Why would you do that?”

Gavin had been in the lab for two years. After receiving his PhD in economics, he had joined the group to learn about the imaging side
of neuroeconomics. I could always count on him to get right to the heart of the matter. He was dogless because of his living situation but had grown up with dogs. He was dating a girl whose role it was to assess the monkeys used in research at Emory for cage compatibility. A monkey matchmaker.

To Gavin’s question, I replied, “To see what they’re thinking.”

“I don’t think you need an MRI to do that,” Gavin said. “It’s
‘Squirrel!’
”

That got a good laugh—we were all fans of Pixar’s
Up
—which of course triggered a round of other what-dogs-are-thinking jokes, centered around food and butt sniffing.

Monica Capra surprised me by being the first in the lab to say this was a good idea. Born and raised in Bolivia, a country ravaged by poor economic policies, Monica had obvious reasons for becoming a professor of economics herself. Unsatisfied with theory, she had gone on to specialize in experimental economics, doing actual tests to verify that people behaved the way other economists said they did. A colleague had introduced us eight years earlier, and because of our mutual interest in decision making, we had hit it off, designing fMRI experiments together ever since.

Monica was a tough cookie, always critical and not shy about poking holes in the ideas of others. Underneath her shell she was a warm person, but she was allergic to dogs. She was the last person in the lab I would have expected to support this.

“People spend an enormous amount of money on their dogs,” she said. “They are important to many people. I think it’s important to figure out why.”

Kristina Blaine, who coordinated all the activities of the lab, voiced her support too, which was strange considering that she lived with four cats.

Sitting next to Monica was Jan Barton. Jan (pronounced
yahn
) is also from South America, in his case, Argentina. Jan is a professor of
accounting. Monica had told him about the kind of research we were doing in the lab, and he had started hanging out with us to figure out how to use neuroimaging in accounting, which was a completely novel application of fMRI and something nobody had done before—always a risk to one’s academic career. Jan had a dog that was on Prozac for anxiety—he just smiled at the idea of scanning dog brains.

Lisa had been deep in thought and said finally, “If we start scanning dogs, does that mean we’ll have dogs in the lab?”

“I guess it does.”

“Yaaayyy!”

I turned to Andrew. There was no way I was going to be able to do this by myself. I still had to teach and supervise the rest of the research projects in the lab. Andrew was the only grad student. This meant he had the most free time to spare. He was also the only person in the lab besides myself who had the necessary technical knowledge about MRI.

“Andrew, do you want to do this?”

“Hell, yeah!”

“Not to rain on the puppy parade,” Lisa said, “but what is the scientific question?”

There are two types of experiments in science: fishing expeditions, where you start collecting data without a clear idea of what the right questions are, and hypothesis-driven experiments, where you start with a specific question to answer. Every middle school student would recognize the latter type as the foundation of the
scientific method.
Most people think that hypothesis-driven experiments are the only way scientific progress occurs. And science journals strongly prefer hypothesis-driven experiments.

The recipe for the typical hypothesis-driven experiment is simple: Take a well-accepted scientific theory. Find some minuscule aspect of that theory that nobody has ever verified before. Do an experiment
that proves that aspect and supports the theory as a whole. Publish.

These experiments make for easy reading and are a surefire way to get results published, building up a résumé that will ensure promotion and tenure at a university. These types of experiments are also popular with funding agencies because the risk of failure is minimal. By my estimate, nearly all published research falls into this arena.

The thing is, hypothesis-driven experiments are incredibly dull. Most of the time you don’t even need to read the experiment to know that the scientists have proven what they basically knew in the first place. If you already have a well-accepted hypothesis, then you already know the most interesting aspects of the scientific question, and the experimental results will, at best, advance knowledge incrementally. Of course, if the hypothesis turns out to be wrong, that would be really interesting. But those results are almost impossible to publish because nobody believes them.

In answer to Lisa’s question, I said, “This is a fishing expedition. It is an idea in search of a question.”

Andrew frowned, clearly troubled by the conflict this would cause with his dissertation research. The standard curriculum of any graduate program in science drills into students the importance of having a clear hypothesis for their research. But I had no hypothesis for the Dog Project. I had no idea how we were going to do this or how long it would take. Frankly, it probably wouldn’t even work.

“Andrew,” I said, “the Dog Project will be high risk. But it’s going to be a blast, and I guarantee you that if it works, we’ll be the first to have pulled it off.”

“I’m in,” he said. “But are we going to have to sedate the dogs?”

“Why would we do that? If they’re sedated, then we won’t know what they’re thinking.”

“So they’ll be completely awake?” Lisa asked.

“They’ll have to be,” I replied. “Just like humans.”

At the time, none of us realized just how much work lay ahead. We didn’t know what the technical difficulties might be, considering dog brains are much smaller than human ones. We hadn’t even begun to think about the actual experiments we might attempt.

At that point, it was all academic. Before we could go any further, we would have to figure out how to train a dog to go inside an MRI.

4

Puppy Steps

E
VEN THOUGH CALLIE HAD BEEN
in the house for a year, I had not completely warmed up to her.

I wasn’t even sure that I liked her.

Kat knew how much I had loved Newton. When she and the girls went to the animal shelter, they had deliberately picked a dog that was about as different from a pug as you could get. Callie was the anti-pug. Pugs are short, stocky, and slow. Callie was a lean, mean fighting machine. Her muscles rippled beneath her thin coat.

Where Newton’s face had been fixed in a permanent clownlike expression, Callie’s was always on high alert. Her head was like a periscope, constantly swiveling back and forth in search of prey. Though she was quite friendly, her posture was off-putting to many of the dogs in the neighborhood.

Callie’s strong drive caused endless distress to Helen and Maddy. Whenever Callie killed a chipmunk, the girls would berate her for her cruelty. To make matters worse, Callie wasn’t cuddly. She didn’t like to sit in laps. Sure, she would readily hop on the sofa, but then she would curl up like a cat at the other end—nearby, but not quite touching.

I missed my bedtime ritual with Newton. He would burrow under the covers, seeking refuge in my armpit, and I would pretend to protest. Although Callie wanted to sleep in the bed, her state of alertness never switched off. She would assume a position at the foot of the bed, facing the door, on watch for potential intruders or edible critters. Any attempt to move her unleashed a snarling, snapping bundle of fur. She wanted nothing to do with my armpit.

There was a dog-training facility in a strip mall within walking distance from our house. It was called Comprehensive Pet Therapy—CPT for short. Shortly after Kat adopted her, we signed Callie up for a basic obedience class.

CPT was the brainchild of Mark Spivak, who founded it in 1992. I first met Mark when we signed Lyra up for obedience training in 2005. Mark was not your typical dog trainer. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics and then received his MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. Mark bounced around the semiconductor industry in the Bay Area for a while but never meshed well with management. After he moved to Atlanta, he and his German shepherd, Topper, started competing in agility competitions to relieve some of his work stress. They did well, and Mark began helping friends with dog-training problems on the side. Within a few years, he decided to take the plunge and go into the dog-training business full-time.

Mark was a no-nonsense kind of guy. He employed several schools of thought about dog training, choosing the methods most appropriate for each dog and owner. And while he favored positive training methods, he acknowledged that punishment was also necessary from time to time.

Even though I hadn’t yet bonded emotionally with Callie, I did enjoy working with her in Mark’s obedience class. Lyra had taken
this class too, but she had never had the level of intensity that Callie brought to the table. Callie wasn’t warm and cuddly, but I had to respect her work ethic. She couldn’t get enough training. She would do anything for a bit of hot dog. I was amazed that she learned basic commands like “sit,” “stay,” and “come” in just a few tries. The CPT teachers loved to use Callie as an example, because she watched them intently and worked tirelessly for a treat.

As Mark was the only dog trainer I knew, it made sense to approach him about the idea of training dogs to go into an MRI. He took an almost academic approach to dog training, so I hoped he would find the idea of scanning dogs’ brains interesting enough to do for fun.

Much to my delight, Mark agreed to meet.

The modern study of dog behavior began with every biologist’s hero, Charles Darwin. In
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal
, Darwin devoted a great deal of attention to the dog—as an owner himself, his study of dog behavior didn’t require a trip to the Galapagos Islands. What Darwin understood, and what every dog owner knows—but many research scientists seem to have forgotten—is that dogs have a rich set of expressions and body language. Darwin had no problem discerning joy, fear, and rage in dogs. He was primarily concerned with observing the expression of these emotions, not with the intent of training these intelligent animals, but rather to understand how human emotions evolved.

It was the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov who launched the modern era of dog training. Unlike Darwin, Pavlov had no love for dogs himself. He was just using them to study the digestive system. The problem was that his dogs started salivating before he fed them, and this messed up his data. Regardless of what you think about Pavlov, his “failed” experiment led to the most important discovery in psychology of the twentieth century, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904. His discovery has completely dominated theories of dog training ever since.

Pavlov’s discovery is called
classical conditioning
(although some people honor him by calling it
Pavlovian conditioning
). During the period in which Pavlov was doing his experiments, physiologists thought of the entire nervous system as a collection of reflexes, like the involuntary leg jerk when a doctor raps on your knee. They believed that all behaviors, even complex ones, were basically a series of reflexive actions. A reflex could be broken down into two parts: the unconditioned stimulus (US) and the unconditioned response (UR). For the knee reflex, the US is the hammer hitting the patellar tendon and the UR is the quadriceps contraction that results in the leg jerking upward. Pretty simple.

Pavlov realized that his dogs were having reflexive responses, but they weren’t natural. Hungry dogs will always salivate when presented with food. This is a natural, and thus unconditioned, response. But, as Pavlov discovered, if something neutral, like the ringing of a bell, regularly precedes the presentation of the food, the dog will start salivating at the sound of the bell. The bell, a neutral stimulus, becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS), and the salivation it evokes is now a conditioned response (CR). The terminology of
unconditioned
and
conditioned
refers to stimuli and responses that are either natural or created by the experimenter.

By itself, classical conditioning doesn’t say much about dog training. The responses are so simple that they don’t constitute anything remotely resembling a behavior, and it is hard to imagine cobbling together a string of these conditioned responses into something as simple as “sit.” This is where
instrumental learning
comes in.

In instrumental learning the animal must do a purposeful behavior. While classical conditioning trains an involuntary response like salivation, instrumental learning aims to train a voluntary action.
Instrumental learning forms the basis of every dog-training method ever published. Teaching the “sit” command is based on instrumental learning. Here, the stimulus is either a hand signal or a spoken word, and the desired behavior is the act of sitting. When the dog sits and he is immediately rewarded, he makes an association between the act and the reward. In instrumental learning, the link between stimulus (“sit”) and act (sitting) is called the stimulus-response (S-R) relationship. Instrumental learning is also called operant conditioning because the animal learns to
operate
on, or affect, the environment.