How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain Read Online Free PDF Page A

They go to the heart of dogs’ subjective experience of the world and, in particular, their subjective experience of us.
    My colleague and his wife didn’t stay long. Even with the dogs locked away we could hear Lyra barking in the bedroom above the din of the party. Nobody was surprised when they were the first to say good-bye.
    Once they left, I let the dogs out. Lyra ran to the remaining guests and, in her state of excitement, puked up something foamy and green. The partiers watched in disgust as Callie darted over to slurp it up.
    From the chorus of “Oooh, gross!” it was clear even the animal lovers were aghast at our dogs’ behavior. An exodus ensued.
    And that is why we no longer hold lab parties at our house.

3
    A Fishing Expedition
    W HILE THE EMBARRASSING INCIDENT of the lab party was the second catalyst of the Dog Project (Newton’s death being the first), the final event that set the project in motion came out of the blue: the death of Osama bin Laden.
    Every Wednesday morning, the members of my research group gather for the one sacred event of every academic laboratory: lab meeting. Regardless of the field of research, every lab in every university holds a meeting once a week, the only time when everyone, from the lowliest undergraduate to the lab director himself, has the opportunity to learn what everyone else has been doing. At lab meeting, everything is laid on the table. You hear about new discoveries, unexplainable data, and false leads.
    All the research my lab does is based on MRI data. We are a “dry” lab because we don’t work with chemicals or do biological experiments that require expensive containment equipment. Those types of labs are “wet” because they have specialized plumbing and air vents to prevent the release of toxic fumes or, worse, infectious microbes. Our lab doesn’t even have a sink. It is simply a large roomwith computer terminals located around the perimeter. A central table serves as a hub for socializing and lab meetings. A calendar hangs on the wall to let everyone know when people are out of town and when we’ll be scanning people at the hospital. This gives a snapshot of how busy we are. No data, no science. I like to see a good flow of research subjects, with at least four a week. Other than that, the walls are covered floor to ceiling with whiteboards. We use the walls to graffiti ideas. Every inch is covered in diagrams, equations, or graphs. Visitors are mesmerized by the visual onslaught of the specialized code of science: Greek symbols, statistical arcana, flow charts. The lab people are literally surrounded by their ideas.
    It takes about two years to go from initial brainstorming to published paper. The actual data collection—scanning subjects in the MRI machine—takes the smallest portion of that time. We might spend six months brainstorming and debugging an idea and only one month collecting the data. Sometimes the results turn out to be a lot more complicated than anticipated. Okay,
most of the time
they turn out to be more complicated than we had expected; sometimes we spend a year analyzing the data to make sense of the results. The process of writing up the findings and submitting to a journal to publish them can also take a year.
    A few years before embarking on the Dog Project, my team began exploring different types of decision making. Having spent a decade studying the effects of rewards like money and food on the brain, we had recently branched out to study decisions based on sacred values. This was not planned. Instead, it came about when I met Scott Atran, an anthropologist who studies the roots of terrorism. We met at an academic conference and, over a bottle of wine, hatched the idea of using fMRI to try to understand how religion and other sacred beliefs guide decision making. It would be a fun collaboration, with the practical added benefit of being fundable by the Department of Defense. But in order to probe people’s sacred values,