GREGORY BERNS: They were the first animals to live with us,
and so to me, it makes a lot of sense
to understand what's going on in their heads.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Oh, I don't mind kisses from you.
My name is Gregory Berns.
I'm a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia,
and I train dogs to go in an MRI scanner
so I can figure out what they're thinking.
A lot of other scientists would say
that we'll never know what it's like to be another animal.
I think the crux of that is because, as far as we know,
no other animal can talk and tell us what
it's like to be that animal.
I don't think the situation is at all that severe.
So the dog we're scanning today, his name is Zen.
In many ways, his name reflects his personality.
He's a very chill dog.
Zen has been with the dog project
almost from the beginning.
We started this project, which we just call the dog project.
We
Recruit people from the community
to teach their dogs how to go in an MRI scanner.
It's really just a matter of getting
the dog used to laying down, putting their head in a chin
rest, learning to wear ear protection, like ear plugs,
and then getting used to the really quite
loud noise of the scanner.
[WHIRRING]
The thing that continues to surprise me
the most when it comes up in every experiment we do
is how different dogs are from each other.
The level of this individuality is the same level
that we see in humans doing these experiments.
The approach that we've taken treats the dogs as individuals,
in the sense that, they're not anesthetized
and they're not restrained.
So they can walk in the scanner.
They can walk out.
This is really quite a radical change
in the way we do biomedical research.
With dogs, historically, we've been
limited to what we call behavioral experiments.
Oftentimes, they'll get a choice of going
to one stimulus or another.
And then from that, you have to deduce what they're thinking.
I think it's very difficult to just know
what a dog is thinking and how they see
the world from their behavior.
What the imaging gets us is a way around that,
because we don't really ask the dogs to do anything,
except just stay still in the scanner.
SPEAKER 1: Good boy, Zen.
GREGORY BERNS: And then we go directly
to their brain to try to read out how
they're processing the world.
[WHIRRING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That's excellent.
When we're studying the brain with MRI,
every little pixel that we see contains thousands of neurons.
So it's like looking at a country like the United States
from outer space.
You can see the roads, and you can see movement of things,
but you can't see the people there.
With imagings, we can't see the neurons,
but we can see how they're connected to each other,
and then we can deduce how it's functioning.
We take those images, which are simply
just digital slices through the dog's brain, which
measure changes in blood flow and blood oxygen, the link
to the activity in the brain, and then we
try to figure out what parts of the brain
are involved in responding to whatever the subject is doing.
Mammalian brains tend to look fairly similar
in a lot of ways.
A large part of this project with the dogs
is trying to identify parts of their brain
that seem analogous to parts in human brains.
And the way we do that is, we do the same experiments that we've
done in humans in the scanner, and adapt
it to make a dog version.
Many of our experiments focus on a particular structure
that's associated with reward processing.
We might show a dog an object, or we might present them
with a scent, and then we'll look
in that region to see if there are
increases in signal intensity.
And that will tell us that the dog's
responding to it in a particular way, so we can understand,
in some sense, what a dog is thinking and feeling.
What we're doing right now is, we're
trying to understand how dogs process two-dimensional images.
It's very peculiar how dogs react to images,
and it's not clear what they get out of an image.
Humans are really good at knowing
that a picture is a representation of something
real.
It's unclear whether other animals can do that
or how well they do that.
SPEAKER 2: Do you want the small earplugs or the other ones?
GREGORY BERNS: He's being shown these objects, and one of them
has been associated with a treat.
So we want to see how he responds to the thing that
was associated with a treat, as well
as its 3D or 2D equivalent.
So that will tell us if there's a specific part
of the brain that differentiates 2D and 3D as there
is in humans.
We're watching his brain right here.
What we have to do after the fact
is go and sync that up with the stimuli that he's seeing
and look for changes in activity in certain parts of his brain.
With regards to dogs, I think we are just at the beginning.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When I started the project, I had no expectations.
It was an idea in search of a question.
Hey, can I train my dog to go on the scanner
to see what she's thinking?
It's slowly built from just really basic reward processing
to really complicated questions about how
they see the world, things like how they process human speech,
really pushing it to the level that we
use with human subjects.
In essentially all the experiments we've done,
we see evidence that dogs also experience basic emotions.
Many of the things these animals experience
also exist within us.
We have words to describe it.
The dog doesn't, but that doesn't mean
that they don't exist there.
And I think perhaps the only way that we're
going to figure it out is by looking into the brain,
because they can't speak to us.