WE COMPARE HUMAN BRAINS TO DOG BRAINS

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Episode Transcript

(00:06):
We look at the mind of adog. Did you know that studies who've
shown the dogs can count sort oflearning to look at two boards with geometric
shapes attached to them and choose theone that has more that can read human
faces. Understanding the importance of usinggaze to communicating to direct our intention believe
it or not, they can excelat what is known as object permanence.

(00:27):
This is something we learn is littlechildren talking about one, two, three
years of age, understanding that onean object is out of sight, it
has not vanished from existence, soif you put it behind a bed sheet
or a piece of paper, it'sstill there. It takes humans a lot
longer to learn the basic truth ofthe world, which is why babies who
toss food or spoon from a highchair was so often not looked down at

(00:49):
the floor to try to find it, because they don't know. Dogs may
be better too than three to fouryear old children are learning to ignore bad
instructions and a Yale study and smallchildren were given a box and taught to
turn a lever to open the lidand get a treat. When the lever
was rigged so that it was nolonger needed, the dogs learned to ignore
it and simply open the box.The children continued to turn the useless thing

(01:12):
all the same. If dogs canbeat us of this one small task,
what other gifts may be hiding now? Mind you, they're supposed to be
one year human years seven years fordogs, so they could be just ahead
of this child. The dog's behavioralsoftware is ultimately determined by the power of
the hardware, and that's their brain. As with all animals, one of
the most important determinants of brain powerssize. By this measure, the human

(01:34):
brain is huge, one fiftieth themass of the average human body. Compare
with humans, and they're one tofifty ratio. Horses are not very high,
they're one to six hundred, andlions are a little up better at
one to fifi and fifty. Butdogs are one and one twenty five,
so they're a little bit more thandouble what a humans double is for the

(01:55):
ratio of their sprain to their body. However, compared to horse and lions,
I guess they're much smarter, andit holds across all breeds, from
the Chihuahua to the English massiff,all the same. A brain that makes
you a genius, as the animalworld. In the animal world is not
much in the human one. Thepreserved brain of an old of an adult
German shepherd, it burns in thelab, and it starkly makes the point.

(02:19):
The brain is the size of atangerine dog. Brains just don't have
enough size do the things that oursdo. While the size of the two
brains differ, the structures aren't strikingsimilar. Though over the past year,
Professor Burns and his team have usedthat's similar area to good effect. Much
of the mri I work has focusedon the part of the brain known as
a striatum rich in dopamine and mediatesreward, pleasure, and expectation, three

(02:40):
pillars of a dog's world. Idon't know if you knew, but the
sin when they say, when yougive them a dog treat that plays that
area in the brain activates. Andwe'll look more at dog brains compared to
human brains as we go along andtalk more about this