What It's Like to Be a Dog

And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience

Gregory Berns

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781786073624
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Veterinary Medicine
• Index: Biological Sciences

What does your dog really think about you?

To find out, Gregory Berns became the first neuroscientist to persuade dogs to lie in an MRI machine wide awake. Now we know more about our best friends than ever before – how varying capacities for self-control and different value systems set them apart as individuals, and how deeply they understand the words we speak to them. Berns’ discoveries have profound implications for how we communicate with and treat these beloved animals.

But he didn’t stop there. Berns also delves into the inner lives of sea lions, bats, dolphins, and even the extinct Tasmanian tiger. His revolutionary explorations are essential reading for animal lovers of all stripes.

Chapter 1

What It’s Like to Be a Dog

In the early spring of 2014, a dedicated group of volunteers coaxed their dogs into a simulator of an MRI scanner.

While waiting his turn, a big, yellow dog named Zen bounded over to me and lowered his head while raising his butt in the air. He wagged his tail, insisting that I play with him. I obliged Zen’s request and tussled with him. After a few minutes of gentle tumbling, Zen had had enough and demonstrated why his name was so apt. He sat his rump on the floor and, in no particular hurry, let his front paws slide out in front of him. He stared back at me, looking as peaceful and inscrutable as the Sphinx.

I wondered what it was like to be Zen.

Zen was a cross between a yellow Lab and a golden retriever, and he was one of the veterans of the Dog Project. As a puppy, he had been slated to become a service dog, but when he entered adolescence, his handlers thought he was too distractible for assistance duty. He was released from the program to be adopted by his puppy-raiser. By tradition, all the dogs of a litter have names beginning with the same letter. Zen just happened to be born into a litter assigned the letter Z. Whoever named him could not have had any idea of his future personality. Maybe dogs grow into their names, but the fact that his name captured his personality seemed like some kind of karmic coincidence.

Zen. (Gregory Berns)

A diverse group of dogs and humans filled the practice space. Zen and his fellow service-dog washouts formed a loose grouping on one side of the room. His buddies included Pearl, a compact and energetic golden retriever who had also been released for distractibility. There was Eddie, short for Edmond, another Lab-golden cross, who could have been Zen’s twin but was released for a predisposition to hip dysplasia. Ohana, a pure golden retriever, was slightly less kinetic than Pearl. Kady, a sweet retriever mix, had been released for being too shy. And then there was Big Jack, a phlegmy, one-hundred-pound golden retriever getting on in years, who was happiest when getting a steady supply of hot dogs.

On the other side of the room, Peter Cook, a postdoctoral fellow from Santa Cruz who had studied sea lions, was supervising a second group of dogs who were less humanized than the retrievers. This crew of irrepressible dogs was led by Libby, a liver-brown pit mix with a limp tail who was holding as still as a statue in the chin rest we’d designed to help the dogs keep their heads in position during imaging. Her owner, Claire Pearce, had found Libby wandering on the side of a highway in California. It was only because Claire was an experienced animal trainer that Libby had become socialized enough to be around people. But being around other dogs was another story. They still sent Libby into a fit of barking and lunging. Claire had staked out a corner of the room where she could control Libby and where Libby wouldn’t disturb the other dogs.

Although many of the other humans participating in the Dog Project didn’t like Libby, I was fond of her. She reminded me of Callie, the black terrier mix whom my wife had adopted from the humane society. Even though Callie was emotionally distant, insecure, and had a tendency toward bullying, she was eager to work. She’d been the first dog to train for the MRI, and the bond we had formed during the project was as intense as any I had ever had with a dog.

Zen and his gang of retrievers were great dogs, the kind every child would love to have, but dogs like Libby and Callie were slightly less domesticated, slightly wilder creatures. They seemed like throwbacks to the last ice age, when our prehistoric ancestors bonded with wolves and turned them into dogs. Living with dogs like Libby and Callie meant accepting unpredictability. Whether these differences in personality came from genetics, levels of puppy socialization, or variations in brain function, nobody could say, but I aimed to find out what it was in Zen’s brain that made him Zen, and what made him different from Libby and the other dogs.

Libby. (Gregory Berns)

The undertaking was not without controversy. Many academics rejected the idea that we could know the mind of an animal, even with modern neuroscience techniques. The crux of the problem was an influential essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Neuroscience, Nagel had said, could never explain the subjective experience of having thoughts and feelings. Even if we knew how a bat’s brain worked, it wouldn’t get us any closer to what it would be like to be a bat. Bats were just too different from humans. Consider sonar. Because humans had no such faculty, we could never imagine what it was like to be a bat using sonar. And forget about flying. According to Nagel, nothing in the bat’s brain could tell us what it was like to fly.

Nagel’s essay cast a long shadow over the interpretation of neuroscience data. Neuroscience dealt with the measurable properties of the brain, but subjective experiences were not so easily quantified. No instrument existed to measure the full experience of smelling a rose or what a dog felt when his owner came home. And the harder we tried to pin down the objective qualities of these experiences, the further we moved away from the unique subjective experience of what they are like. Without the means to quantify the subjective experience, there could be no marriage with neuroscience. According to Nagel, we could deconstruct brains all we wanted, but without the link between subjective and objective, we would never get any closer to knowing what it was like to be an animal. The argument applied to humans, too. No matter what we said or did, there would be no way to fully know what it was like to be someone else without actually being that person. According to this logic, looking in a person’s brain wouldn’t help.

His two examples, flying and echolocation, at first glance do seem very different from human experience. But thrill seekers now regularly don wingsuits and sail through alpine canyons. They look like human bats, and those who dare to take flight can tell us what it is like to fly. Even the echolocation argument falls flat. We all have a nascent ability to sound out a room. Simply by speaking, it is not difficult to make out the differences in size and composition of a bathroom, a dance hall, or a concert auditorium.

When we ask what it’s like to be a bat, or a dog, we are asking about the internal experience of an animal. Call it a mental state. The question is one of internal versus external perspectives. Nagel argued that we couldn’t know what it’s like to be a bat (or another person) without being that individual, because subjective experience is an internal perspective—how an individual feels on the inside—and that is different from how they might describe the feeling to someone else or what another person might observe about them. The description of internal feelings is one way to share experiences with each other, but as Nagel pointed out, they are not the same thing as the experience itself.

But just because we can’t be another human being doesn’t mean we can’t have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to be someone else. Language plays an important role, allowing us to communicate and describe stuff to each other, but even language may not be all that necessary for the sharing of experiences. The main reason we can describe events to each other is that humans share the same physical attributes and inhabit the same environments. We’re so similar that language can ride on top of these commonalities, acting as a symbolic shorthand.

These commonalities extend to other animals. We share basic physiological processes necessary for life with many different types of animals, and within the class of mammals, we share even more. We all breathe air. We have four limbs. We sleep. We eat. We reproduce sexually and give birth to live young that nurse for a period of time. And many mammals are highly social. With such physical similarities, the structure of our internal experiences is not likely to be as different as has often been assumed.

These physical domains suggest a way to understand the internal experience of another individual. Instead of trying to answer the big question of what it is like to be a dog, we can be more precise. What is it like for a dog to experience joy? Even more specifically, what is it like for Zen to experience joy? Or what is it like for Libby to refrain from barking at other dogs? Obvious domains in which we could ask questions include perception, emotion, and movement. There are also domains necessary for the maintenance of bodily functions, such as sleep, thirst, and hunger. The sum total of all of these domains constitutes mental experience.

Humans have a few extra dimensions, notably language and symbolic representation. Apart from communicating with each other, language lets us conduct an internal monologue. It rides on top of the other domains, labeling other aspects of experience. We can’t help it. Some have argued that language is so integral to human experience that words change everything. William James, the father of American psychology, wrote that a man is afraid of a bear only because he becomes aware that his heart is beating faster and says to himself, “I’m scared!”

The primacy of language had caused many researchers to abandon the possibility of knowing what an animal experienced. Because a dog can’t say to himself, “I’m scared,” some scientists had even taken to redefining the most studied animal emotion—fear—as a behavioral program that an animal implemented to avoid something painful. This was a step backward toward a Cartesian view of animals as automatons.

Some might think that a scientist should remain agnostic, but the same wait-and-see attitude had dominated the debate about climate change. It is true that much remains unknown about the climate, but at a certain point the evidence becomes too much to ignore, and any rational person will come to the conclusion that the planet is heating up because of human activity. The same is true for the mental lives of animals. As with climate change, there were consequences for denying their existence. Continued agnosticism about animal emotions, or even the degree of consciousness in different animals, had allowed people to exploit them in myriad ways. But this was beginning to change.

Before modern neuroscience techniques became available, the only way to gain access to mental states was by observing behavior, or, in the case of humans, by asking what a person was thinking or experiencing. Both are imperfect measures of mental states. The observation of behavior requires us to make assumptions about what an individual is experiencing internally. This works pretty well with people because of our physical similarities and shared culture, but with animal behavior we have a larger gulf to bridge to their internal states. And what if an animal isn’t doing anything? How can we know what he or she is feeling, if anything at all? These types of questions were at the heart of Nagel’s argument against the possibility of knowing what it was like to be an animal.

There might have been self-serving reasons for scientists to conclude that animals didn’t experience emotions. Scientists had to justify invasive research procedures. But I found such rationalizations self-serving and disingenuous. The inability of animals to label an internal state did not mean they didn’t experience something on the inside akin to what a human would experience under similar circumstances. And I wasn’t the only one to question the status quo. With the benefit of forty years of progress since Nagel’s essay, the pendulum was now swinging in favor of neuroscience. Two recent advances had shown that we could, in fact, use the brain to know what it was like to have mental experiences even in the absence of outward behavior.

In 2006, Adrian Owen, a Cambridge neuroscientist, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain responses of a twenty-three-year-old woman who was unresponsive after a traffic accident had caused severe brain trauma. By all clinical measures, she was in a vegetative state. Yet, when Owen and his team spoke to her, they observed increased activity in the left frontal cortex, especially to sentences that had ambiguous meanings. Even more remarkably, when the woman was given instructions to imagine herself playing tennis or visiting the rooms of her house, Owen had observed increased activity in the regions of her cortex associated with spatial navigation. Owen’s results were hugely important. They demonstrated that internal subjective experiences could become disconnected from outward behavior, but that brain imaging could reveal the inner side.

In 2008, Jack Gallant, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, pushed the boundaries of brain-decoding even further. Gallant demonstrated that he could determine what a person was looking at just by measuring activity in the visual cortex. Over the next several years, Gallant increasingly refined the technique to the point where he could determine not only what a person was looking at, but the type of image it was (such as a person, object, or scene), and even when a person was remembering an image instead of seeing it. Gallant’s techniques proved that, without a doubt, measures of physical activity in the brain could be translated into discrete mental states—in this case, visual imagery. It was a triumphant vindication for the material reductionists. Specific mental domains could be decoded from the brain.

If these techniques worked for humans, there was no reason why similar approaches couldn’t be used to decode animal states of mind. Knowing what it was like to be a bat, or a dog, began to seem like a real possibility.

With Libby warmed up, Claire released her from the chin rest. Libby saw me watching her and took that as an invitation to play. She tried to accelerate to full speed, but without traction on the slippery floor, she half-ran, half-hopped in excitement over to me. She leapt toward my face. Anticipating this, I dodged to the side, and Libby went whizzing by. Only then did I kneel down to accept her aggressive face-licking.

Claire came over and clipped on Libby’s leash. “Libby. Enough.”

Libby sat her butt on the floor and swiveled her head back and forth between Claire and me. It took every ounce of self-control for Libby not to leap at my face in slobbery excitement. If she didn’t have a limp tail, it would have been sweeping the floor.

“Let’s put her in the tube,” Peter said.

The tube was a six-foot piece of Sonotube, which normally would have been used as a mold for concrete pillars. I had repurposed it to simulate the inside of an MRI scanner. It was mounted horizontally on a table in the center of the practice space and had a piece of plywood inside of it to serve as the patient table.

Claire led Libby to a set of portable steps that ascended to the opening of the tube. Libby had been participating in the Dog Project for three years, and she knew what to do. She rocketed up the steps and scrambled into her chin rest, a block of foam with a semicircular cutout to match the profile of Lib-by’s muzzle. The chin rest was affixed to a mockup of the head coil, the part of an MRI that picked up signals emanating from the brain. The human version looked like a Stormtrooper helmet out of Star Wars, but for the dogs we only used the lower part of the coil, the piece that normally sat around a person’s neck.

With Libby in a crouch position and her head in the coil, Claire began to run through trials of a new experiment. All of our previous stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 What It’s Like to Be a Dog
• 2 The Marshmallow Test
• 3 Why a Brain?
• 4 Seizing Sea Lions
• 5 Rudiments
• 6 Painting with Sound
• 7 Buridan’s Ass
• 8 Talk to the Animals
• 9 A Death in Tasmania
• 10 Lonesome Tiger
• 11 Dog Lab
• Epilogue: The Brain Ark
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright