Dogs Love Us Like Family
Louise and I got a dog a few months ago. It’s a Shih Tzu, and we named him Karma. He’s adorable!
In almost completely unrelated news, I’m a really big geek in terms of reading literature on the brain, brain scans, brain technology, and related brain information.
That’s why I deemed the following article worth writing about:
Brain Scans Reveal What Dogs Really Think of Us
Brain scans have come far enough that they’re using them now on dogs to confirm or deny what they’re actually thinking. And this is important, because, as the article notes, over 50% of US households have a dog. That’s huge.
First of all, dogs really do notice very subtle changes in your mood or attitude. This is something that pretty much every dog owner suspected, but the brain scans of dogs listening to human voices confirm it. They’re actually hard-wired to notice whether you’re sad, excited, angry, happy, or anything in between.
Second, dogs (which navigate the world with smell more than anything else) actually respond to human odors more than anything else, even scents of other dogs, all of which means that dogs actually see humans as their family (or at least as close to a notion of family as a dog gets).
On the other end, humans react to dogs in the same way that they react to babies – both light up the exact same reward centers in our brains. That’s not necessarily an assertion that everyone should go out and get a dog, but Louise and I are certainly glad we did.