September 1, 2025 • 18 mins
We have very special relationships with our pets. We usually try to talk to them. Do they understand what we are saying? Do they know their names? We quickly explore what it means for our pets to "understand" us or to "know" their names. There are some things we know about this and some things we don't.
Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/wwdwwdpodcast
Links and References:
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/why-we-do-what-we-do--3419521/support.
Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/wwdwwdpodcast
Links and References:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktIgM1qN4Lo
- https://www.aspcapetinsurance.com/resources/can-dogs-understand-humans/
- https://www.whole-dog-journal.com/lifestyle/how-much-do-dogs-understand-humans/
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/why-we-do-what-we-do--3419521/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome
to Why we do what we do? Many I am
your host Abraham, and I'm your.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Host Shane, or is I like to say in dog
Bark Bark, Bark, Bark Bark.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
We are a psychology podcast. We like to talk about
the things that humans and non human animals do, kind
of the subject of today's podcast. And this is a
mini that means we're going to do a quick dive
into this topic and then be done with it and
move on about our day and let you move on
with your day. So it's just short and that's the
thing that we do because it's a mini. So welcome.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Yeah, super stoked to have you. And so for those
of us, like we have pets and we hang out
with our pets and stuff, and we hope so much
as they understand us. And so we're going to unpack
that today.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yes, and before we do that, I'll say if you
like to support us, who can join us on Patreon,
leave us a rating and review, like subscribe, tell a friend.
I'll talk more about that at the end of this discussion. Now,
we actually have a lot to say here, so I'm
going to try and just do it efficiently. I try
not to speak so fast that at double speed I
am unintelligible. I'll try and say somewhat slowly here, but
(01:14):
also make sure that we're moving efficiently, which is not
very effective when I repeat myself. Sure, jumping into it.
Then we talk to our pets. That's the thing that
we do. And I think many of us believe that
our pets are understanding us, at least in part, if
not in full, and maybe even believe that our pets
try to communicate back to us. So the question we're
asking in this mini is do our pets understand us?
(01:37):
Do they know their names? And if that was the
case one way or the other, how would we know
that thing? So let's go ahead and jump into the
research here.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, so here's what you want to hear. Of course
they understand us, Yes, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt.
Everything you think about your pets brilliance is totally correct. Yep,
And that's the end of the mini. Thank you guys
for being here. We appreciate it. We'll see at another time.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Great easy peasy, we ac published circle very short. Maybe
all right, here's the reality though, do they understand us?
Kind of, but not in the way that you think
that they do. Probably do they know their names? Depends
on what you mean by no know. How would we
know if they know their names or if they understand us? Again,
(02:22):
it depends on what you mean by no, but mostly
through their behavior and some basic epistemological agreements about how
we would understand such things.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yeah, so let's start with this. The research on this
is just terrible. Yeah, to the degree that Abraham takes
personal offense, it feels like a personal attack. I do
these research articles. Yeah, so we're gonna outline it. We're
gonna talk about the research that's been done. We're going
to criticize it into a deep, deep grave where it
belongs because it's just not done.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Well, yeah, that's bad. So one study put dogs in
an FMR on We've done a whole episode on fMRIs.
But they wanted to look at these dogs' brains, and
the functional MRI will do that. And what they did
is they issued a series of verbal commands like they
would for these creatures who have likely experienced these verbal
commands in the form of statements. And then what they
(03:17):
did is they tried to vary the tone of those statements.
Then they looked at the dog's brains to see where
the information they received in the brain was being perceived.
That was what they wanted to accomplish, to see like
where are these things happening in the brain?
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, so they reported that words were processed in one
part of the brain, but tone was processed in another.
How they determined which part of the brain was processing
which part of the speech is they decided they wanted
it to be that way, and then it was that's
as far as that went.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, that's science, Like, this is the outcome I want.
So this is the outcome I'm going to say, is
what happened? Yeah, well, again, they did try to vary
the pitch, so they tried to associate changes in the
level of brain activity with whether it was responding to that.
But what you can't actually know is is among the
various issues that exist with fMRIs when trying to understand
psychology and things like understanding, which is to say, it
(04:10):
basically doesn't do that at all. Right, the assumptions they
have to make are that the changes they see in
the brain are directly related to the stimulation, that the
aspects of the stimulation that they concerned with our reflecting
those parts of the brain, and that it's somehow meaningful
that they are separated in those two places. Their argument
essentially is that they are processing words and their processing tone,
(04:30):
but they do them differently, meaning they do understand us.
That's sort of the argument they're trying to get at here.
But no, not really, Nah. It very well could be
the case that they process both of those things in
both parts of the brain at the same time. It
could be that they had the relative associations of one
switched with the other, and the fact that they are
maybe processing different parts, which again comes from the average
(04:52):
of filtering out a bunch of other processes going on
in the brain, and assuming that the fact that there's
more activity in those parts of the brain then the
others indicates that those are the most important parts of
the brain involved in activity. And while they might be,
it doesn't mean that they're the only parts, or that
they have anything necessarily to do with the fact that
they're processing that speech in any way that could potentially
be interpreted as meaningful. It is dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb,
(05:15):
and they're wrong. Yeah, But anyway, the point of here
was that that was what they decided what happened in
that one. But there's another study, and what they decided
to do is have dogs look at these two dimensional
pictures of humans showing characteristic emotional features. And we've talked
about this before, but they use the sort of Ekman's
emotional picture like facial expressions thing for this. So they
(05:37):
showed essentially these dogs these these two dimensional, flat printoutive
pictures and they're like looking for the dog's heart rate
when they looked at those pictures of various emotional states
depicted on human faces. And then they also measured which
direction the dog turned its head when presented with a picture.
That is how they decided they would understand dogs under
(05:59):
like have a respet sponds to emotional reactions in humans.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
It's amazing to me that they think that dogs would
respond to this in a way like could you imagine
like playing an ad and then having a dog respond
to it and then measuring their response.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
I can imagine it. I don't think it's a good idea.
Well let's try it if you have a pet play
this ad? All right, So we're back talking about this
one where they showed dogs pictures and then the measure
their heart rate, because you know, when you have a
bad idea, just run with it. I guess, yeah, this
(06:37):
study is so absurd.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
It's not good. First, dogs famously have super eyes. Their
eyes are about as useful to their interaction with the
world as our noses are. Imagine if you could primarily
navigate your environment by smell, how difficult would it be
to drive or even get around your space, or how
difficult would it be to tell how somebody feels by
their smell? Extremely and that's what their vision is like.
(07:02):
We are terrible with our smell. They are terrible with
their eyesight. Their best senses are their spell in their hearing,
and those two senses alone are so much more powerful
than ours that we can't even begin to grasp what
it must be like.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And yet they used visual.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Cues to measure their emotions, like, I don't even think
that they would respond to a human model in a
way that would be reliable that if it only had
visual cues to go with it, let alone a two
dimensional version of this.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Right now, of course, heart rate is objective, they were
trying to use that. But also heart rate is like
constantly changing it goes up and down all the time.
And I suppose if you were trying, you could probably
eke out some statistical significance with any large enough sample
size here, which is what they seem to have done
in this case. And they may have found a statistically
significant difference in their heart rate with respect to those
(07:50):
different images, but these are not meaningly significant, and they
had no control group. And I look through the study
and it does not like there's no reason to believe
that that heart rate should be interpreted as anything that
has to do with their understanding of the emotional state
of the pictures that they're looking at, because again, that
requires a crazy number of assumptions based on stimuli that
have very little stimulus control. Again, I would really like
(08:13):
to emphasize that this is like trying to have humans
smell another human and interpret their emotion from smell alone blindfold.
You walk up to a body and you go and
you're like, I think that they feel sad. Like that's
like the equivalent of what they're trying to do with this. Yeah,
the study by using having dogs look at two D images.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, and then they rationalize that turning their head corresponds
to a particular hemisphere of the brain indicating how information
was being processed, as if that is the most important
factor in why a dog might turn its head. I
don't think it is even a factor, let alone the factor.
And we could almost guarantee that we could train a
dog to do the opposite any in very very little time. Like,
(08:53):
just give us the right treats and the right context,
and I bet we can get this dog doing all
kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Yeah, yeah, it could. We could have them yawn, we
could have them do all kinds of things. The factors
that go into in determining why a dog would turn
its head are varied and numerous, and pretty much none
of them have to do with two D stimuli right,
exactly at all. So that's just ridiculous. All right, Let's
pretend that those studies never happened, because we'll know more
about dog psychology without those studies than we will know
(09:20):
about dog psychology with those studies, and move on to
the really answering the question, then do our pets understand us?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So? Non human animals primarily learn to interact with a
variety of stimulus inputs with respect to what happens when
they react to those stimuli so the amount of stimuli
they can learn is pretty large, but it is never abstract.
They learn stimulus equals response equals outcome. It's pretty straightforward,
and that's that's pretty true for almost every organism on
the planet.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, except for humans. We can learn that stimulus equals
like semantic representation of a sure right that this seems
to be something that is kind of unique about us,
But the vast majority of animals don't demonstrate that, not
in the way that we ever measured it, or if
they do, it's in a capacity that looks very very
different from how humans do it, which means that even
if they do something that looks like our version of language,
we're not measuring it by measuring our version of language
(10:09):
with them, right, at least not meaningfully. So let's start
with the fact that some animals are genetically predisposed to
respond to greater or lesser capacity to social cues. I
think that we can acknowledge that, like some of us,
we just have evolved to respond to social cues more
than others. Son animals do not particularly participate in social cues,
and therefore have not evolved to be very sensitive to
(10:31):
those social cues or social consequences, Like there are many animals.
I think spiders are kind of a fairly good example
of this, Like they don't tend to like do a
lot socially with one another, We don't. They kind of
sometimes hang out in similar spaces, but I think that's
by nature of the fact that tends to be where
there's food and where breeding happens. But they do not
seem to otherwise respond to a lot of other social cues.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Right Let's talk about reptiles for a second, because they're
not usually very social at all, Like mammals tend to
be more social, with dogs being on the pretty extreme
into the social relevance of their evolutionary development, so they
tend to be more sensitive to our cues as a species.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah, whereas reptiles really also again not particularly social. They
just don't respond very much to cues or in consequences
that come from a social stimulus. Right now, dogs and
other pets, they do rely on a lot of different
types of cues from us. We did an episode talking
about how they can smell small changes in our saliva
that indicate if we're about to have a seizure, Like
(11:27):
that's crazy to wrap your head around thinking about like
smelling something that nuanced. Therefore, are hormones. Pheromones and other
smells we give off when communicating are important to their
ability to recognize our communication, what we're saying and communicating,
And of course our tones are also very important. So
in addition to the fact that we're saying something to them,
they get the tone of the thing that we're saying
(11:48):
and any smells that we're giving off that probably change
on a moment to moment by basis with respect to
our emotional states.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
So let's remind you about that first study. Okay, in
that first thing we mentioned in this topic in this episode,
it even showed that praise only registered as praise if
the words and tones matched. So, yes, they will learn
a pretty significant arsenal of words, but they'll also learn
a pretty significant arsenal of tones. In addition, they learn
our body language, so they don't have any metaphorical or
(12:15):
semantic understanding of our language at all. However, they'll be
able to learn words, pattern, tone, smells, body language, and
engage in behaviors to produce the most positive outcome for
them from that set of cues.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, I mean, if you imagine someone trying to communicate
with you in a language you don't understand at all,
like it has no cognates, nothing that you can latch onto.
You can still use their tone in body language quite
a bit, and even in that case, you'll barely be
able to understand them at all, like right, pretty much,
very little, but you'll get like maybe a general idea,
particularly if they're like trying to mime things to you,
(12:47):
which again, like that is a lot more than you're
going to get from like being able to communicate with dogs,
because we can have the semantic arbitrary meaning of those
mimed things. And furthermore, you have the benefit of having
a general understanding of how language works, which our pets don't.
So that's like how that communication is happening with them
relative to like if we're trying to speak with someone
(13:07):
who we do not share language with.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Right. So then the other question that comes up around
this is do they know their names? And again kind
of but not in the way that you might think.
So they will learn to respond to a pattern of words, tone, smells,
and body language that you use when using their name
in particular ways.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
It'll likely be.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Something they encounter more than most other words and sounds
that you make, and we'll have a relatively clear set
of actions that they can engage in and expect a
positive outcome from doing so. So remember that when we're
talking about this, they don't use language the way that
we do. So names are no more important to their
identity than your own. Scent is important to your identity,
even though that matters a lot to your pet.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, like we don't. We don't walk around thinking about
how like our smell is who we are. I mean
maybe some people do, but like relatively few of us are,
Like this is felly John does? This is my body odor?
It is mine and no one else has it here.
I am smell me roar exactly. But our names very
(14:06):
very critical to sort of our to our identity. Right.
Dogs are the opposite, Like they couldn't give to about
like what names they received or their genders or anything
like that. But the smells very important, like they can
I think a lot of effective information out of smells, right,
And so that is a way that is a lot
more effective for them to communicate. So I don't think
names they just don't have any meaning for them. They shouldn't.
(14:27):
They wouldn't they don't. But what they do have is
like they do get to learn that like we communicate
in a particular way, which involves a series of smells, sounds, tones,
and body language, and that those would then all become
relevant cues that they can respond to. And the name
is that thing they hear a lot, So like do
they know their name? Not the way that you think
they will recognize the series of patterns, words and tones
(14:49):
that come with it. But like even before off Mike,
before we started recording, Shane mentioned a story where they
had a dog where they would just call it whatever,
like they'd give it. They just call it random things
and would respond as if it were its name. And
you could probably try this with your pets. And also
think about the fact that like often enough you call
your pets by a nickname, then often isn't even their name.
You might call them other like pet names like cutie
(15:12):
or love or baby or things like that, where like
that's not even remotely close to their name, and yet
they kind of respond to it as if it were. Yeah,
we say those things to them, and they like, look
at us because we are saying it in a pitch
and tone and cadence and delivery that's very similar to
how we would say their names.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
And furthermore, if we say their name in like a
pitch and tone and cadence that's very different from how
we usually say their name, we might get nothing from
them whatsoever. So like just acknowledging that, like there are
a lot of stimulus features that they can attend to. Yeah,
And so knowing their name is a dumb question because
it depends on what you mean by no, will they
respond to it? Probably? Do they internalize that as part
(15:51):
of their identity? No, because that's dumb, and that they don't.
They don't use language in that way, right.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I think of a My friend has a dog named Masuka.
Nobody ever calls them massuit. Sure, when I see him,
I say, I call him super Zook, Like what's up, superzooke?
So like that's how he responds, and but then all
also change my pitch. They've got another dog named Minnie Minerva,
and she goes by Minnie and we don't call her mini.
We all go like it's not intelligible, and she freaks out.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
She loves it.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
She like her ears drop and she's like yeah, like
she's like super stoked. So you know, it's one of
those things where it's like you can call her anything
you want and she would respond to that tone. And
because that tone and like the body languag would be
reaching for her to pet her. Is all part of
like the cues of responding in the to the in
getting those outcomes of like pets and scratches and treats
(16:38):
and stuff.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Yeah, now everything we said about dogs applies to cats
here as well. For those of you who are questioning
that cats do tend to have slightly less social impetus
than dogs, but still like they have more social relevance
than many other animals that we might also keep his pets,
like your pet spider truly does not care about his
name or anything that you say to it, right, it doesn't.
(17:01):
It does not operate that way. But like cats and
dogs and other mammals like, they tend to be more
further on that spectrum. Cats and dogs are pretty high
on that spectrum. Things like rabbits and guinea pigs fairly
low on the spectrum, but still more so than your spider.
So like it just there is a spectrum there. But yeah,
the short answer of all this is do they understand us?
I mean, they can learn to respond to us in
(17:21):
meaningful ways, but under they don't have There's no reason
to believe that they have any semantic relation to those
And the only way that we would have to measure
whether or not they quote unquote understand is did they
react to us? Right? All right? We going kind along
for a many but so let's go ahead and wrap
this one up. If you like what you heard today,
you'd like to support us, go join us on Patreon.
You'll get ad free episodes, behind the scenes content, and
(17:41):
I'll read your name during our full length episodes. You
can also leave us a rating and review if you
like us, and go tell a friend help share the
word as very helpful as well. You can tell us
your thoughts about pets by emailing us directly info at
wwdwwdpodcast dot com, or reaging us on the social media platforms.
Thank you so much to my team of people for
helping me make this podcast. Thank you for recording with
me today.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Shane anytime.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Thank you everyone for listening. Is there anything you would
like to add or anything that I forgot before we
wrap this one up?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Not today, nope, just pet your dogs for me. Tell
your dog, I said Hi.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yes, tell your dogs and your cats that we said Hi.
I think that's very good, all right. I think that's
all we have for the for today. This is Abraham
and this is Shane. Why We Do what we Do
Mini is out.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
You've been listening to Why We Do What We Do.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
You can learn more about this and other episodes by
going to WWDWWD podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and
we hope you have an awesome day
You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome
to Why we do what we do? Many I am
your host Abraham, and I'm your.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Host Shane, or is I like to say in dog
Bark Bark, Bark, Bark Bark.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
We are a psychology podcast. We like to talk about
the things that humans and non human animals do, kind
of the subject of today's podcast. And this is a
mini that means we're going to do a quick dive
into this topic and then be done with it and
move on about our day and let you move on
with your day. So it's just short and that's the
thing that we do because it's a mini. So welcome.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Yeah, super stoked to have you. And so for those
of us, like we have pets and we hang out
with our pets and stuff, and we hope so much
as they understand us. And so we're going to unpack
that today.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yes, and before we do that, I'll say if you
like to support us, who can join us on Patreon,
leave us a rating and review, like subscribe, tell a friend.
I'll talk more about that at the end of this discussion. Now,
we actually have a lot to say here, so I'm
going to try and just do it efficiently. I try
not to speak so fast that at double speed I
am unintelligible. I'll try and say somewhat slowly here, but
(01:14):
also make sure that we're moving efficiently, which is not
very effective when I repeat myself. Sure, jumping into it.
Then we talk to our pets. That's the thing that
we do. And I think many of us believe that
our pets are understanding us, at least in part, if
not in full, and maybe even believe that our pets
try to communicate back to us. So the question we're
asking in this mini is do our pets understand us?
(01:37):
Do they know their names? And if that was the
case one way or the other, how would we know
that thing? So let's go ahead and jump into the
research here.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, so here's what you want to hear. Of course
they understand us, Yes, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt.
Everything you think about your pets brilliance is totally correct. Yep,
And that's the end of the mini. Thank you guys
for being here. We appreciate it. We'll see at another time.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Great easy peasy, we ac published circle very short. Maybe
all right, here's the reality though, do they understand us?
Kind of, but not in the way that you think
that they do. Probably do they know their names? Depends
on what you mean by no know. How would we
know if they know their names or if they understand us? Again,
(02:22):
it depends on what you mean by no, but mostly
through their behavior and some basic epistemological agreements about how
we would understand such things.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yeah, so let's start with this. The research on this
is just terrible. Yeah, to the degree that Abraham takes
personal offense, it feels like a personal attack. I do
these research articles. Yeah, so we're gonna outline it. We're
gonna talk about the research that's been done. We're going
to criticize it into a deep, deep grave where it
belongs because it's just not done.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Well, yeah, that's bad. So one study put dogs in
an FMR on We've done a whole episode on fMRIs.
But they wanted to look at these dogs' brains, and
the functional MRI will do that. And what they did
is they issued a series of verbal commands like they
would for these creatures who have likely experienced these verbal
commands in the form of statements. And then what they
(03:17):
did is they tried to vary the tone of those statements.
Then they looked at the dog's brains to see where
the information they received in the brain was being perceived.
That was what they wanted to accomplish, to see like
where are these things happening in the brain?
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, so they reported that words were processed in one
part of the brain, but tone was processed in another.
How they determined which part of the brain was processing
which part of the speech is they decided they wanted
it to be that way, and then it was that's
as far as that went.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, that's science, Like, this is the outcome I want.
So this is the outcome I'm going to say, is
what happened? Yeah, well, again, they did try to vary
the pitch, so they tried to associate changes in the
level of brain activity with whether it was responding to that.
But what you can't actually know is is among the
various issues that exist with fMRIs when trying to understand
psychology and things like understanding, which is to say, it
(04:10):
basically doesn't do that at all. Right, the assumptions they
have to make are that the changes they see in
the brain are directly related to the stimulation, that the
aspects of the stimulation that they concerned with our reflecting
those parts of the brain, and that it's somehow meaningful
that they are separated in those two places. Their argument
essentially is that they are processing words and their processing tone,
(04:30):
but they do them differently, meaning they do understand us.
That's sort of the argument they're trying to get at here.
But no, not really, Nah. It very well could be
the case that they process both of those things in
both parts of the brain at the same time. It
could be that they had the relative associations of one
switched with the other, and the fact that they are
maybe processing different parts, which again comes from the average
(04:52):
of filtering out a bunch of other processes going on
in the brain, and assuming that the fact that there's
more activity in those parts of the brain then the
others indicates that those are the most important parts of
the brain involved in activity. And while they might be,
it doesn't mean that they're the only parts, or that
they have anything necessarily to do with the fact that
they're processing that speech in any way that could potentially
be interpreted as meaningful. It is dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb,
(05:15):
and they're wrong. Yeah, But anyway, the point of here
was that that was what they decided what happened in
that one. But there's another study, and what they decided
to do is have dogs look at these two dimensional
pictures of humans showing characteristic emotional features. And we've talked
about this before, but they use the sort of Ekman's
emotional picture like facial expressions thing for this. So they
(05:37):
showed essentially these dogs these these two dimensional, flat printoutive
pictures and they're like looking for the dog's heart rate
when they looked at those pictures of various emotional states
depicted on human faces. And then they also measured which
direction the dog turned its head when presented with a picture.
That is how they decided they would understand dogs under
(05:59):
like have a respet sponds to emotional reactions in humans.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
It's amazing to me that they think that dogs would
respond to this in a way like could you imagine
like playing an ad and then having a dog respond
to it and then measuring their response.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
I can imagine it. I don't think it's a good idea.
Well let's try it if you have a pet play
this ad? All right, So we're back talking about this
one where they showed dogs pictures and then the measure
their heart rate, because you know, when you have a
bad idea, just run with it. I guess, yeah, this
(06:37):
study is so absurd.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
It's not good. First, dogs famously have super eyes. Their
eyes are about as useful to their interaction with the
world as our noses are. Imagine if you could primarily
navigate your environment by smell, how difficult would it be
to drive or even get around your space, or how
difficult would it be to tell how somebody feels by
their smell? Extremely and that's what their vision is like.
(07:02):
We are terrible with our smell. They are terrible with
their eyesight. Their best senses are their spell in their hearing,
and those two senses alone are so much more powerful
than ours that we can't even begin to grasp what
it must be like.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And yet they used visual.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Cues to measure their emotions, like, I don't even think
that they would respond to a human model in a
way that would be reliable that if it only had
visual cues to go with it, let alone a two
dimensional version of this.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Right now, of course, heart rate is objective, they were
trying to use that. But also heart rate is like
constantly changing it goes up and down all the time.
And I suppose if you were trying, you could probably
eke out some statistical significance with any large enough sample
size here, which is what they seem to have done
in this case. And they may have found a statistically
significant difference in their heart rate with respect to those
(07:50):
different images, but these are not meaningly significant, and they
had no control group. And I look through the study
and it does not like there's no reason to believe
that that heart rate should be interpreted as anything that
has to do with their understanding of the emotional state
of the pictures that they're looking at, because again, that
requires a crazy number of assumptions based on stimuli that
have very little stimulus control. Again, I would really like
(08:13):
to emphasize that this is like trying to have humans
smell another human and interpret their emotion from smell alone blindfold.
You walk up to a body and you go and
you're like, I think that they feel sad. Like that's
like the equivalent of what they're trying to do with this. Yeah,
the study by using having dogs look at two D images.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, and then they rationalize that turning their head corresponds
to a particular hemisphere of the brain indicating how information
was being processed, as if that is the most important
factor in why a dog might turn its head. I
don't think it is even a factor, let alone the factor.
And we could almost guarantee that we could train a
dog to do the opposite any in very very little time. Like,
(08:53):
just give us the right treats and the right context,
and I bet we can get this dog doing all
kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Yeah, yeah, it could. We could have them yawn, we
could have them do all kinds of things. The factors
that go into in determining why a dog would turn
its head are varied and numerous, and pretty much none
of them have to do with two D stimuli right,
exactly at all. So that's just ridiculous. All right, Let's
pretend that those studies never happened, because we'll know more
about dog psychology without those studies than we will know
(09:20):
about dog psychology with those studies, and move on to
the really answering the question, then do our pets understand us?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So? Non human animals primarily learn to interact with a
variety of stimulus inputs with respect to what happens when
they react to those stimuli so the amount of stimuli
they can learn is pretty large, but it is never abstract.
They learn stimulus equals response equals outcome. It's pretty straightforward,
and that's that's pretty true for almost every organism on
the planet.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, except for humans. We can learn that stimulus equals
like semantic representation of a sure right that this seems
to be something that is kind of unique about us,
But the vast majority of animals don't demonstrate that, not
in the way that we ever measured it, or if
they do, it's in a capacity that looks very very
different from how humans do it, which means that even
if they do something that looks like our version of language,
we're not measuring it by measuring our version of language
(10:09):
with them, right, at least not meaningfully. So let's start
with the fact that some animals are genetically predisposed to
respond to greater or lesser capacity to social cues. I
think that we can acknowledge that, like some of us,
we just have evolved to respond to social cues more
than others. Son animals do not particularly participate in social cues,
and therefore have not evolved to be very sensitive to
(10:31):
those social cues or social consequences, Like there are many animals.
I think spiders are kind of a fairly good example
of this, Like they don't tend to like do a
lot socially with one another, We don't. They kind of
sometimes hang out in similar spaces, but I think that's
by nature of the fact that tends to be where
there's food and where breeding happens. But they do not
seem to otherwise respond to a lot of other social cues.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Right Let's talk about reptiles for a second, because they're
not usually very social at all, Like mammals tend to
be more social, with dogs being on the pretty extreme
into the social relevance of their evolutionary development, so they
tend to be more sensitive to our cues as a species.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah, whereas reptiles really also again not particularly social. They
just don't respond very much to cues or in consequences
that come from a social stimulus. Right now, dogs and
other pets, they do rely on a lot of different
types of cues from us. We did an episode talking
about how they can smell small changes in our saliva
that indicate if we're about to have a seizure, Like
(11:27):
that's crazy to wrap your head around thinking about like
smelling something that nuanced. Therefore, are hormones. Pheromones and other
smells we give off when communicating are important to their
ability to recognize our communication, what we're saying and communicating,
And of course our tones are also very important. So
in addition to the fact that we're saying something to them,
they get the tone of the thing that we're saying
(11:48):
and any smells that we're giving off that probably change
on a moment to moment by basis with respect to
our emotional states.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
So let's remind you about that first study. Okay, in
that first thing we mentioned in this topic in this episode,
it even showed that praise only registered as praise if
the words and tones matched. So, yes, they will learn
a pretty significant arsenal of words, but they'll also learn
a pretty significant arsenal of tones. In addition, they learn
our body language, so they don't have any metaphorical or
(12:15):
semantic understanding of our language at all. However, they'll be
able to learn words, pattern, tone, smells, body language, and
engage in behaviors to produce the most positive outcome for
them from that set of cues.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, I mean, if you imagine someone trying to communicate
with you in a language you don't understand at all,
like it has no cognates, nothing that you can latch onto.
You can still use their tone in body language quite
a bit, and even in that case, you'll barely be
able to understand them at all, like right, pretty much,
very little, but you'll get like maybe a general idea,
particularly if they're like trying to mime things to you,
(12:47):
which again, like that is a lot more than you're
going to get from like being able to communicate with dogs,
because we can have the semantic arbitrary meaning of those
mimed things. And furthermore, you have the benefit of having
a general understanding of how language works, which our pets don't.
So that's like how that communication is happening with them
relative to like if we're trying to speak with someone
(13:07):
who we do not share language with.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Right. So then the other question that comes up around
this is do they know their names? And again kind
of but not in the way that you might think.
So they will learn to respond to a pattern of words, tone, smells,
and body language that you use when using their name
in particular ways.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
It'll likely be.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Something they encounter more than most other words and sounds
that you make, and we'll have a relatively clear set
of actions that they can engage in and expect a
positive outcome from doing so. So remember that when we're
talking about this, they don't use language the way that
we do. So names are no more important to their
identity than your own. Scent is important to your identity,
even though that matters a lot to your pet.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, like we don't. We don't walk around thinking about
how like our smell is who we are. I mean
maybe some people do, but like relatively few of us are,
Like this is felly John does? This is my body odor?
It is mine and no one else has it here.
I am smell me roar exactly. But our names very
(14:06):
very critical to sort of our to our identity. Right.
Dogs are the opposite, Like they couldn't give to about
like what names they received or their genders or anything
like that. But the smells very important, like they can
I think a lot of effective information out of smells, right,
And so that is a way that is a lot
more effective for them to communicate. So I don't think
names they just don't have any meaning for them. They shouldn't.
(14:27):
They wouldn't they don't. But what they do have is
like they do get to learn that like we communicate
in a particular way, which involves a series of smells, sounds, tones,
and body language, and that those would then all become
relevant cues that they can respond to. And the name
is that thing they hear a lot, So like do
they know their name? Not the way that you think
they will recognize the series of patterns, words and tones
(14:49):
that come with it. But like even before off Mike,
before we started recording, Shane mentioned a story where they
had a dog where they would just call it whatever,
like they'd give it. They just call it random things
and would respond as if it were its name. And
you could probably try this with your pets. And also
think about the fact that like often enough you call
your pets by a nickname, then often isn't even their name.
You might call them other like pet names like cutie
(15:12):
or love or baby or things like that, where like
that's not even remotely close to their name, and yet
they kind of respond to it as if it were. Yeah,
we say those things to them, and they like, look
at us because we are saying it in a pitch
and tone and cadence and delivery that's very similar to
how we would say their names.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
And furthermore, if we say their name in like a
pitch and tone and cadence that's very different from how
we usually say their name, we might get nothing from
them whatsoever. So like just acknowledging that, like there are
a lot of stimulus features that they can attend to. Yeah,
And so knowing their name is a dumb question because
it depends on what you mean by no, will they
respond to it? Probably? Do they internalize that as part
(15:51):
of their identity? No, because that's dumb, and that they don't.
They don't use language in that way, right.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I think of a My friend has a dog named Masuka.
Nobody ever calls them massuit. Sure, when I see him,
I say, I call him super Zook, Like what's up, superzooke?
So like that's how he responds, and but then all
also change my pitch. They've got another dog named Minnie Minerva,
and she goes by Minnie and we don't call her mini.
We all go like it's not intelligible, and she freaks out.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
She loves it.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
She like her ears drop and she's like yeah, like
she's like super stoked. So you know, it's one of
those things where it's like you can call her anything
you want and she would respond to that tone. And
because that tone and like the body languag would be
reaching for her to pet her. Is all part of
like the cues of responding in the to the in
getting those outcomes of like pets and scratches and treats
(16:38):
and stuff.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Yeah, now everything we said about dogs applies to cats
here as well. For those of you who are questioning
that cats do tend to have slightly less social impetus
than dogs, but still like they have more social relevance
than many other animals that we might also keep his pets,
like your pet spider truly does not care about his
name or anything that you say to it, right, it doesn't.
(17:01):
It does not operate that way. But like cats and
dogs and other mammals like, they tend to be more
further on that spectrum. Cats and dogs are pretty high
on that spectrum. Things like rabbits and guinea pigs fairly
low on the spectrum, but still more so than your spider.
So like it just there is a spectrum there. But yeah,
the short answer of all this is do they understand us?
I mean, they can learn to respond to us in
(17:21):
meaningful ways, but under they don't have There's no reason
to believe that they have any semantic relation to those
And the only way that we would have to measure
whether or not they quote unquote understand is did they
react to us? Right? All right? We going kind along
for a many but so let's go ahead and wrap
this one up. If you like what you heard today,
you'd like to support us, go join us on Patreon.
You'll get ad free episodes, behind the scenes content, and
(17:41):
I'll read your name during our full length episodes. You
can also leave us a rating and review if you
like us, and go tell a friend help share the
word as very helpful as well. You can tell us
your thoughts about pets by emailing us directly info at
wwdwwdpodcast dot com, or reaging us on the social media platforms.
Thank you so much to my team of people for
helping me make this podcast. Thank you for recording with
me today.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Shane anytime.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Thank you everyone for listening. Is there anything you would
like to add or anything that I forgot before we
wrap this one up?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Not today, nope, just pet your dogs for me. Tell
your dog, I said Hi.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yes, tell your dogs and your cats that we said Hi.
I think that's very good, all right. I think that's
all we have for the for today. This is Abraham
and this is Shane. Why We Do what we Do
Mini is out.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
You've been listening to Why We Do What We Do.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
You can learn more about this and other episodes by
going to WWDWWD podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and
we hope you have an awesome day
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com