(bright music)
- Give me a hug.
Give me a hug.
Yes, I know. Good girl.
Wanna do some training?
I work with dogs to train them to go into an MRI scanner,
and try to figure out what makes them tick, and
what they're thinking.
(bright music)
My name is Gregory Berns.
I'm a neuroscientist at Emory University
in Atlanta, Georgia.
I've grown up with dogs, and I've lived with dogs
pretty much my whole life.
One of my favorite dogs had passed away.
In the back of my mind I started wondering, did that dog
love me in the way that I loved him?
And that was really the beginning of it.
All of these basic things that we've begun to
sort out in humans, at least in human brains,
we want to do in dogs.
If dogs can be trained to go into an MRI machine,
then maybe we could figure out what
they're actually thinking.
So, we have a dog in the scanner.
That's Katie, and she is a veteran on the project.
This is probably about the fifteenth time she's done this.
(bright music) (scanner blips)
Just having the idea of, okay, well let's train dogs
to go on the scanner, it wasn't immediately apparent
how you would go about doing that.
And MRI scanners are not the most pleasant environments.
(scanner blips)
(directs dog)
Good girl!
Callie is the little black terrier who was the first dog
to train for the dog project.
High five.
I built a simulator, oven MRI.
So this is the simulator that I built, here in my basement.
Then we started adding in recordings of the scanner noise,
which is actually quite loud.
(scanner blips)
We just started working with, you know, treats
and positive reinforcement to see if we could get her
to go into this thing.
That actually proved to be pretty easy.
And then so what we did is we kind of put out word of mouth,
do you wanna join this project, do you wanna train
your dogs for an MRI, and you know, maybe figure out
what they're thinking?
The purpose of this is to go through a number
of exercises including basic obedience, as well as
how they react to the obstacles.
When we hold the trials, it lets us weed out the dogs
that we don't think would enjoy doing this.
One of the benefits then, of having more participants
is it gives you statistical power.
You can start to average dogs brains together
and get a better sense for what's happening.
I started wondering very seriously if we could
really finally answer this question: do dogs essentially
like us just for the social bond?
Not about the food.
And what we found was that in looking at the reward system,
that almost all the dogs had equal responses both
to food, as well as praise.
Even a few dogs like the praise more.
The things that we were finding about the dogs brain,
in many ways confirmed, I think, what people
know in their hearts about how dogs behave,
and why they behave.
And the way I think about dogs is in many ways
they're the ambassadors to the animal world.
(dog barks)
They're not that different from many of the
other mammals out there.
And so I suspect that a lot of what we find in dogs
probably holds true for pretty much any mammal.
(gentle music)