{"id":1186,"date":"2012-05-15T14:05:13","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T18:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/heavenlycreatures\/?p=1186"},"modified":"2014-05-07T17:10:14","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T21:10:14","slug":"scientists-use-fmri-to-see-what-fido-is-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/heavenlycreatures\/2012\/05\/scientists-use-fmri-to-see-what-fido-is-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists use MRI to see what Fido is thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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What do you think Bandit is thinking right now?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

There isn\u2019t a day that goes by that I don\u2019t look at my quirky Border collie, Bandit, and say, \u201cI wish I knew what you were thinking right now.\u201d My guess is that, if you have dogs, you often think the same thing.<\/p>\n

Well, researchers at Emory University have found a way to study what\u2019s going on in Fido\u2019s brain with what is likely the first functional MRI performed on a dog.<\/p>\n

In this kind of brain scan, dogs were studied while they were awake and unrestrained \u2013 no sedation, no leashes. Just a dog in her normal dog-like alert state with some humans talking to dogs the way we talk to dogs.<\/p>\n

You know there were hot dogs involved.<\/p>\n

Over the course of several months, Gregory Berns and Andrew Brooks, of the Center for Neuropolicy, and Mark Spivak, Comprehensive Pet Therapy, and their team trained two dogs \u2013 Callie, a 2-year-old feist (Southern squirrel-hunting dog) and McKenzie, a 3-year-old border collie \u2013 to be able to calmly enter an MRI machine, wearing headphones to drown out the machine noise, and\u00a0lie still for the brain scan.<\/p>\n

Once the dog was in the machine, researchers then showed the dog two hand signals she had been trained to understand: one meant a hot dog was coming, the other meant no hot dog. Researchers where then able to look at the dog\u2019s brain while she was in the machine, allowing them to see what parts of the brain lit up right when she saw the hand signal.<\/p>\n

What they found was that when the dog saw the signal that indicated a hot dog was on the way, the area of the brain called the caudate region showed activity; this is a region associated with rewards in humans. When the \u201cno hot dog\u201d signal was given, there was no activity in that area.<\/p>\n