Dogs Kinda Do Understand You

[Yazata]

Researchers in Budapest Hungary fitted dogs with earphones, then put them in a functional MRI machine to image their brains while their people spoke to them in the phones.

(If you've ever had an MRI, you know that it takes a long time,the machine is very loud and is probably pretty scary for a dog. It only works if the subject lies perfectly still. So teaching the dogs to lie still took some time.)

One of the more striking observations was human-style brain lateralization. The dogs' right brains were more involved with tone of voice, while the left brains picked out words the dogs knew.

The researchers tried telling the dogs distressing things (like 'you're going to the vet today') in a happy tone of voice, and the dogs' brains reacted differently than if they were told something more pleasant in the same tone. They also tried speaking to the dogs in nonsense syllables in the same tone of voice as meaningful words, but the dogs' brains reacted differently to it.

The researchers hypothesized that the rudiments of language ability might lie deeper in our evolutionary history than was previously thought. They speculate that other animals might have similar abilities to understand words, but are just less interested than dogs in humans' constant verbalizing. Dogs have been living with humans since the stone age, after all.

It's tempting for me to speculate that the tone of voice aspect is part of a social animal's social abilities, part of how they read the emotional states of the animals they associate with. And the more left-brained human-style language ability may have evolved from a more analytic kind of listening, where animals can interpret sounds like footsteps or the sound of twigs breaking and assign meaning to it (intruders!) Dogs might be using that sort of auditory analytical ability to interpret the sounds that humans make. And human language processing might be using a more evolved version of the same system. I really doubt if dogs have any conception of grammar though. They may not have any concept of meaning either, and are interpreting human sounds as signs, like smoke is a sign of fire. Humans just tend to emit certain kinds of sounds when certain things are going to happen, and the smart cutting-edge dog can learn to interpret that.

The paper is in the August 29 issue of Science.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dogs-same-par...49575.html

Here's the MRI machine and the test subjects:

[Image: Dog-Brains-NH-816x460.jpg]

[Magical Realist]

Might explain why the time I called my dog shithead in a loving tone he didn't come to me. lol!

[scheherazade]

Our pets are very good at reading our body language, not only our voice and tone. Our entire demeanor is different depending on what we are contemplating and/or saying and I do not doubt that they are also able to make considerable analysis based on our body temperature, rate of breathing and scent, all of which come into play.

We are also creatures of habit in what we say and do and dogs, cats and horses are very good at pattern recognition of actions, words and gestures.