“How Dogs Love Us” by Gregory Berns

How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain

By Gregory Berns
2013
272 pages / 7 hours and 41 minutes
Nonfiction

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I love dogs. I was the besotted owner of two pugs. Or maybe it was the other way around. People often ask me why I went for pugs, and I give a variety of answers. One good answer is, “Insufficient research.” (Only kidding, pug lovers.) Another good reason is I wanted a dog I could be sure couldn’t outsmart me. Many dogs that were bred to do a job seem unsettlingly smart. Pugs were bred to be amusing companions to inbred royalty. But like almost all dog owners I constantly wondered what was going on in their furry little heads. Now we know that the dog brain has a lot more going on than the cat brain (sorry, cat lovers, but it’s a well established fact) but a lot less than the human brain. The question of all questions for dog owners is this: does my dog really love me, or is this just instinctive submission to the pack leader?

So I want to offer you a book that makes a good faith attempt to answer the question scientifically. How Dogs Love Us is an absolutely enchanting journey in mapping the canine mind. Berns is a professor at Emory University with both an MD and a PhD. He is a professor of neuroeconomics (whatever that is) and a dog lover.

He set out on what seems an almost impossible task … and largely succeeded. He built a special MRI machine and trained dogs to lie still in it while fully awake in order to take an MRI of the fully conscious brain of a dog. You have to have some appreciation for how difficult this really is. You have to train the dog to go up into the machine, put their chin on a prop, and hold still while loud popping noises are going on around them. They have to remain motionless there while their brain is mapped. Try that with your dog. It turns out that bites of hotdogs are crucial to this task. Who would’ve guessed that hotdogs would be important to a serious scientific experiment? Dogs have to audition and prove they are up to the task. It requires enormous training. Many are called but few are chosen. Oh yeah, I should mention the book has pictures (very cute and impressive). The star of our show is Dr. Berns’s dog Callie.

Unless you underestimate what is accomplished here I would point out that we know a great deal more about the human brain than we do the canine brain. Conscious humans are actually a lot easier to study. One of the great questions is how the canine brain is alike or different from its human counterpart. Which leads me back to our original question. Do dogs just react to us instinctually or is there something like love there?

Well, if I say any more I will take away the joy of discovery from the reader. Why should you read this book? If you like or love dogs, you wouldn't be asking that question. And if you don’t, I'm sure you lost interest long before you got to this sentence.