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

missionaries then living in Japan. But their religious fervor didn’t stick to Andrew. He swung the other way and found his calling in science. Even so, his route to Emory University was unusual.
    Emory is considered a fairly prestigious institution, and most of the students who apply to graduate school come from a predictable group of universities. The Ivy Leaguers tend to stay in the Northeast, so Emory gets a steady feed of students from the “Southern Ivies” like Duke and Vanderbilt Universities. But Andrew had gone to a local community college and then transferred to a tiny liberal arts school in Macon, Georgia. After he graduated, he had applied to grad school at Emory. Macon is about as deep in the South as you can get. I knew Macon only as the home of the Allman Brothers Band and the place where Duane Allman was killed when his motorcycle collided with a flatbed truck in 1971, leading to the posthumous classic album
Eat a Peach.
    Early in my career, I would have turned up my nose at a student like Andrew. There was a time when I mistook pedigree, or even raw intellect, as the key determinant of success in science. But I had grown wary of the paper superstars. Too many incredibly smart students had come through the lab who didn’t have the passion for research. Maybe they were accustomed to things being easy for them. Unfortunately, science never goes the way you expect. Many of them didn’t deal with the unexpected very well.
    Andrew didn’t take anything for granted. He was smart, he worked hard, and he had a fire in the belly for doing experiments that might fail spectacularly. And Andrew was a dog person. He lived with a toy poodle named Daisy and an American Eskimo called Mochi.
    The other big dog person in the lab was Lisa LaViers. Lisa had just joined the lab after graduating from Emory. She had done well in my neuroeconomics class the previous semester, and when a job opened up in the lab, I had encouraged her to apply.
    Lisa was, in a word, perky. As one of the younger people in the lab, I loved her sense of adventure and the enthusiasm that she brought to the team. Although she had no previous experience with fMRI, I went on a gut instinct that she could quickly learn the skills to carry a project from the starting line all the way to the finish. She had majored in economics, so she had some math skills. Everything we did in the lab, from programming experiments to analyzing the fMRI data, involved a fair amount of mathematical sophistication. Even so, nothing an econ major couldn’t handle. Although Lisa was initially apprehensive about taking a job for which she was a newbie, she quickly gained confidence as she took over the sacred values project.
    Lisa’s most endearing feature was what she referred to as her birth defect. It was more like a mannerism. Whenever Lisa listened intently to someone talking, she would wrinkle her eyebrows in a Spock-like expression. Most people interpreted this as a sign of confusion. Since Lisa was a social person who listened to a lot of people, some people concluded she was perpetually confused.
    But Lisa was never confused when it came to dogs. She was head over heels in love with her two-year-old goldendoodle, Sheriff. Sheriff was a big, goofy dog. Larger than both a standard poodle and a golden retriever, he was imposing until he opened his mouth in a grin that broadcast,
I love you, whoever you are
.
    After everyone had seen the pictures of the military dogs, the group settled in around the central table.
    “If dogs can be trained to jump out of helicopters,” I began, “then surely they can be trained to go into an MRI.”
    Andrew nodded. Lisa’s eyebrows crinkled up.
    Gavin Ekins was the first to ask the obvious question: “Why would you do that?”
    Gavin had been in the lab for two years. After receiving his PhD in economics, he had joined the group to learn about the imaging sideof neuroeconomics. I could always count on him to get right to the heart