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, we would have to push on hot-button issues. Race, religion, sex, guns, abortion, gay rights—all the stuff you don’t talk about with the in-laws.
We spent a year brainstorming the sacred values experiment, at least half that time wasted because nobody in the lab truly felt comfortable talking about these issues. Scientists or not, if you really push on what is sacred to people, you can be sure they’ll be offended.
At some point, I think the lab realized that we weren’t going to make progress until we got better at suggesting ideas that might offend someone else. So it was with a determined effort that we became truly politically incorrect. That’s also how we really got to know one another. The team includes people of different sexes, sexual orientations, religions, races, political affiliations, even diets. Drawing on our own sacred values, we each compiled a list of the most offensive statements we could imagine and whittled them down. When we examined the brain responses to these statements, we found that the brain processes sacred values as rules—like the Ten Commandments. This was important because it explained why sacred beliefs are so resistant to change. They cannot be argued with, and they cannot be traded for money or other material things.
Maybe it was some kind of cosmic premonition, but one of the issues we probed in the sacred values experiment was whether people identified themselves as a dog person or a cat person. I am not sure this is a good thing, but I have always categorized people this way. And if the answer was “neither,” then that was the worst of all.
Against this backdrop of the sacred values experiment, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden was all over the news. As details trickled out, it was revealed that a dog had accompanied SEAL Team 6.
This shouldn’t have been particularly surprising; dogs have been part of military units throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They are fixtures at border crossings and airports, and every urban police department has a K9 unit. But the fact that a dog had helped kill the most wanted man in the world was something special. It showed that dogs were not just companions. Even though it could have no understanding of democracy, a dog had helped defend a way of life.
Like the human members of SEAL Team 6, the identity of the dog on the mission wasn’t revealed. But this anonymity just stoked the media firestorm. To satisfy the public’s appetite for details, the public relations arm of the navy released stock photos of military working dogs: A German shepherd wearing a bulletproof vest bounding through a stream. A Belgian malinois, in tandem with its handler, leaping off the ramp of a helicopter.
The most touching photo was of a dog strapped to the chest of a soldier parachuting out of an airplane at thirty thousand feet, both wearing oxygen masks. The soldier cradled the dog with one arm while pulling the parachute release cord with the other. The closeness of the bond and the physical embrace really hit home for me: dogs and humans belong together. We couldn’t exist without each other.
Prior to seeing those photos, I had been completely unaware that dogs had been trained to do such amazing feats. The noise from a helicopter is deafening. Most humans take some time to get used to it, and even then they wear heavy-duty ear protection. Obviously these dogs had been acclimated to some fairly hostile environments. Judging from the photos, they not only tolerated them, they enjoyed working in them with their humans.
“Did you guys hear there was a dog on the SEAL team?” I asked at our Wednesday lab meeting. The team came over to one of the computers to see the images of the military dogs that had gotten me so excited.
“That’s badass!” Andrew Brooks, the sole graduate student in the lab, said. Andrew had been in the lab for two years and was working toward his PhD in neuroscience. I liked him a lot. His parents were 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.