The second flaw is the reliance on wolf behavior to interpret dog behavior, termed lupomorphism. While it is true that dogs and wolves share a common ancestor, that does not mean that dogs are descended from wolves. This is an important distinction. The evolutionary trajectories of wolves and dogs diverged when some of the “wolf-dogs” started hanging out with proto-humans. Those that stuck around became dogs, and those that stayed away became modern wolves. Modern wolves behave differently from dogs, and they have very different social structures. Their brains are different too. Interpreting dog behavior through the lens of wolf behavior is even worse than anthropomorphizing: it’s a human anthropomorphizing wolf behavior and using that flawed impression as an analogy for dog behavior.
Wolf analogies have led to many flawed training strategies based on the idea that the human must be the “pack leader,” an approach most commonly associated with Cesar Millan. Unfortunately, there is no scientific basis for using the wolf’s social structure as a model for the dog-human relationship.
Dogs can’t talk, and we can’t transport ourselves into a dog’s mind to know what its subjective experience is. Where I see a happy golden retriever playfully jumping up and down, someone else might see a hungry dog planning to eat her for dinner. So what can we do to better know a dog’s mind?
Although I hadn’t yet made the connection at the party, I would soon realize that the solution had been right in front of me all along: brain imaging.
Because all mammalian brains have substantially similar parts, a map of canine brain activation could be referenced to its human equivalent. For instance, if we saw activation in the reward center of the dog brain, that could be interpreted through human experiments that result in similar activity. With human experiments, we have a reasonably good idea of what happened to create a particular pattern of brain activation. We know, for example, that activity in the visual part of the brain can be caused either by photons hitting the retina or by the person mentally imagining a scene with his eyes closed. Similarly, if we observed activity in the visual part of a dog’s brain, and the dog wasn’t looking at anything, we could reasonably assume that it was forming a mental image of something. Dogs might have imaginations too!
Mapping between the brains of different species is called a functional homology. It means that a subjective experience like imagination can map onto both a human brain and a dog brain. The patterns of activity in the two brains would illustrate how to transform one type of brain into the other.
Philosophers dismiss the question of what it is like to be a dog as unanswerable, but functional homologies between dog and human brains could provide the missing link. Although brain imaging wouldn’t tell us what it is like for a dog to be a dog, it could provide a road map—a brain map—of what it would be like for a human to be a dog, without the bias of the human interpreter. If it worked, brain imaging could end up being a canine neural translator. We could go way beyond the question of why Lyra was being obnoxious at the party. If we could map our thoughts and feelings onto the dog brain, we could get right to the heart of the dog-human relationship: Do dogs love us?
It all comes down to reciprocity. If the dog-human relationship is predominantly one-sided, with humans projecting their thoughts onto the dog vacuously staring up at his master in the hopes of receiving a doggie treat, then the dog is not much better than a big teddy bear—a warm, soft, comforting object.
But what if the dog reciprocates in the relationship? Do dogs have some concept of humans as something more than food dispensers? Simply knowing that human feelings toward dogs are reciprocated in some way, even if only partially, changes everything. It would mean that dog-human relationships belong on the same plane as human-human relationships.
None of these questions can be answered simply by observing dogs’ behavior. 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
WHILE 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 room with 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.