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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-05-18
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0Y-GU3JqiQ
many of your dog people Joe hands excellent how about cat people okay guys can go to the break early okay so of the dog people and the cat people who want to be dog people how many of you have thought it would be great to know of my dog is thinking and I think everyone else already knows what their dogs thinking right well I got into
this project and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how I is basically a a stupid dog track story %HESITATION it really started with this dog name Newton who was really my favorite dog I've had many dogs to my wife %HESITATION but Noone was my favorite and he lived to be about fifteen years old and after he passed away I thought you know I have
these tools this MRI machine that I've been using for decades to study human decision making and what motivates people why haven't we use this on other animals certainly other animals have many of the same feelings and motivations that people do but this is kind of an area of science that people don't like to talk about and so I marked on this project about four years ago
to try to figure out what dogs think specifically what dogs think of us never talking about humans we have conf two ways we can think about what other people are thinking we can either ask them and sometimes they will tell us if they know and it and they want us to know what they're thinking or we can observe actions and we can observe behaviors and we
can try to infer things about what people are thinking from their actions with animals and dogs of course can't really ask them what we can ask them in we may think that they tell us but we really don't know what they're thinking and so were were kind of left with their behaviors we can observe their actions and we can try to infer what they're thinking now
this is this is the foundation of behaviorism it's been around since Pavlov but there of course very tricky issues here and humans being humans we tend to Antipater files everything so it's kind of in this area that I became very interested in intrigued with the possibility of trying to figure out what dogs are thinking by using MRR and the technique is straight forward it's been around
for decades and the idea is if we were studying human we would put a human and an MRI have them do some type of task and we measure blood flow or brain activity and then try to figure out what parts of the brain do what very straight forward if you had an MRI it's not terribly pleasant but people will do it so how do we do
this with other animals how do we do it with a dog well I'm going to show you and then I'll show you what we found so here's a short video it's a what we call our training video that demonstrates how we did this now before I start it you're going to see two dogs in this video the first dog Callie is my dog she was actually
the replacement for Newton and she was adopted here in Atlanta from the Humane Society and we we love Newton so much we could never get another plug so Callie is the anti punk you'll see all the other dog you'll see is McKenzie a border collie and will disconnect get right into it and I'll narrate as we go along so this is mark Spivak he's my partner
in this endeavor he's a dog trainer in the first thing that we have to do is figure out how we get dogs you go into a two around put my head coil around there had to pick up the brain waves and hold absolutely still and what you're seeing here is Callie is not a particularly obedient dog she has no particularly %HESITATION special skills and but she
does have one very good trait nasty like hot dogs the market is doing local clicker training so every time she approximates what we wanted to do he clicks on them she gets a hot dog this is the very first time ex she's been introduced the thing we call the head coil and so we didn't know at this point whether this was even going to be possible
this dog McKenzie a border collie is highly trained %HESITATION she's very skilled in agility and her owner because you'll see gets hurt us sit and the squirrel berry quickly take care all two four and now yeah basically we're looking for for the brain brain thing that's the brain case to be in the center of right that's good if if if you've had an MRI you know
they are told not to move right and this is this is the big challenge of doing this and open those point I didn't know if this is going to be possible until I saw this this was literally after about five minutes of training when I saw that I knew we could do this so what he saw mackenzie doing was close but not quite good enough what
we're going after if were to achieve data that %HESITATION comparison humans who are is perfect excellent yeah how about %HESITATION mark told me I had to be more demonstrative than I am normally yeah yeah so what you know as we did was we introduce a little chin rest because we have to give the dog a target to put their their head on and mackenzie adopts this
very quickly and she's an actually you can tell she's actually in a simulator now for an MRI that we built and she did quite well but this is actually still too much movement the really difficult part of this is the noise that the scanner makes and you can hear this playing in the background these recordings that we made to acclimate the dogs to the training it's
very loud this is being played at low volume just to get her used to it but it's really about ninety five decibels like Jack Hymne that's what so this is after about a month or two of training and we're at the real MRI now and this is probably the most expensive training session ever performed we we we get charged about five hundred dollars an hour to
use the MRI and but we have to use the real thing at a certain point at this point we didn't even know how they would react to the magnetic field I think the key thing I want you to to notice is that these dogs are doing it willingly and they enjoy it and that is the whole point of this project we we treat these animals as
family members we don't sedate them and we don't restrain them and so this is actually after about two months of training we made some modifications to the chin rest and even a shelter dog like Callie can do to us if you look carefully also notice that she's wearing earmuffs set it's very important because a scanner so loud and dogs hearing is is quite sensitive so the
other thing that we did this is a scientific experiment really so that's the training video and the hot dog no hot though hand signals weeks we started with us because we didn't know if this was going to work and so we decided we needed to do something really simple and this is just straight up Pavlovian conditioning where we taught the dogs to hand signals this means
hot dog and this means no hot dog so if this technique works what we should see is activity in the reports parts of their brain the reward system to this hand signal but not the signal I'm not I also %HESITATION put up a slide here that once we started doing this kind of word got out amongst the community here in Atlanta that you know we're doing
this crazy dog scanning project or looking for volunteers especially people who like to train dogs and have dogs that are very well behaved that is still true if you have a dog they can do this or you think can do this talk to me because of the project is still going on that's gotten quite large so you see in the the kind of the preliminary videos
this is one of my favorite photos because it kind of captures this is I think the first day we were actually doing scanning it captures the human confusion here you know it's just standing around trying to figure out what how we're gonna do this but the county knows she's been trenches been doing this for two months and so she's ready to go and up the head
wrap is just to keep the that your plugs in place their mouths this is what looks like from the other end from the business end of the scanner this is actually a dog names and he's a %HESITATION yellow lab golden retriever and what we're studying initially is like I said just the reward system response and very simply we got these two hand signals in the ideas
we compare the bring response to these two things as I said we have many dogs doing this now it's not just shelter dogs we have dogs %HESITATION firms a service dog organizations we have shelter dogs really all sorts of breeds okay three four show you some of the results I do want to say something about brain anatomy now a dog brain this slide is not to
scale the dog brain is probably about the size of plum or lemon maybe depending on the size of the dog it's not big so even if you have a big dog most of the head is muscle so this can be aware of that but I like putting up the slide because it it shows the similarities of animal brains and you can immediately make out kind of
common structures you can see %HESITATION towards the right that kind of very %HESITATION pretty structures the cerebellum that controls %HESITATION various types of motor movement and then below that there's the brain stem and really the parts of the brain that are different I will call the cortex and so that's the upper part that's the the folded part in the big differences between dogging him and have
to do with the size of the cortex and how folders what folding accomplices is packing a lot more brain surface area into a specific volume so generally speaking the more folder brain the more surface area the more brain power a few well so there's lots of similarities and there some differences what I'm particularly interested in are the similarities because if we are to have a a
commonality of experience with dogs and other animals for that matter we have to share the same or similar brain structures Darwin said this a hundred fifty years ago okay so what are the results look like this is a very compact way of summarizing the experiment which I showed you where the dogs received two different hand signals and we've average the results over in this case twelve
dogs I think that we've done this probably in over twenty dogs and the orange areas show what parts of the brain are more active to this reward signaled hot dog signal now what I want to emphasize is the brain response is not directly to hot dogs to the hand signal that means hot dogs and you may think well that's not a big deal it's still hot
dogs right and it's no surprise that dogs like hot dogs but it is a big deal because we train the signal it's a symbolic representation of a hot dog the dog has learned in has learned to recognize this meaning and particular parts of the brain that are being active are the reward system this kind of two hot spots those those a headlight type picture that's an
area of the brain called the caudate nucleus and it's the area the brain that that all mammals have in that's the area that has the most dopamine receptors in the brain that it's kind of the key center that links reward and motivation with action so normally when that's active in a human or really any other animal it means that something important has happened and the animal
needs to do something in this case it's quite simple because they will just eat the hot dogs well so what so we proved the dog brands like hot dogs well that was just the beginning and this %HESITATION started about four years ago and we've since gone on and done many other experiments %HESITATION most of the dogs that you saw in these pictures are still working with
us in the project we've done things looking at how they're there olfaction or their sensory %HESITATION system for smell works how they identify a different people and other dogs in their household by smell and one of the things that we found for example is that this reward system the same part the brain activates when the dog smell a familiar human even if the humans not there
and so it shows that dogs have representations of us of our identities that persist when we're not there and so when people ask me will do dogs miss us when we're gone I have to say yes because we find evidence that they are remembering their humans they care about them and that it's associated with these rewards responses is it still just hot dogs so to answer
this question one of the other things that we did was we actually repeated the experiment I showed you where we showed the different hand signals with one little twist we manipulate who gives the signals so does it matter if the dog's owner gives a signal or whether stranger comes in and gives the signal or even whether a computer gives the signal because if you believe Pavlov
and all the behaviorists who followed him it really shouldn't matter because you know any signal that indicates an upcoming food treat is all the same if animals are and dogs are just kind of robots but in fact we did find a difference and what's very interesting about it is that not all dogs are the same so for example my dog Callie had a much greater response
in that part the brain when a stranger gave the signals or even a computer as opposed to make %HESITATION other dogs in the projects some of the %HESITATION golden retrievers in the labs you saw have had the opposite pattern where their owners had really elicited the strongest bring response this is this is very interesting because what it does is it provides us with the neural biomarker
of of a dog's personality profile in fact what we've done is we've spun off a new project which we're very excited about we've partnered with canine companions for independence which is the largest service dog training organization and in the United States now if you know anything about service dogs they are incredibly difficult to train it's very expensive and there's a very low success rate roughly about
thirty five percent of dogs to enter these programs to train to be assistance dogs will succeed in the other two thirds end up being released and adopted to their puppy raisers so we've partnered with CCI and they are actually training their dogs to do the MRI procedure and what we're going to do is try to predict which of those dogs will actually be good service dogs
and so I really love this project because it shows that even though we started this just as kind of my silly example of of trying to understand what my dogs think in whether they Love Me it's actually gotten much bigger dogs dogs are special they are the first domesticated animals they have been with human since humans have been humans and so when we look at their
