Podcast: The Question On Every Pet Owner's Mind

This episode of All In The Mind, ABC Radio National's podcast about people mind, brain and behaviour, tackles a question that I'm positive all pet owners have at least once asked themselves: Does my pet love me?

Professor of Neuroscience Gregory Berns took that question seriously and set out to discover if dogs think and feel similarly to the way we humans do. The way to do that was to look at the changes in the brains of dogs during an MRI scan. But then again, how does someone convince a dog to sit still in a coffin-like machine that makes scary loud noises throughout the scan? It took Berns a while, but he's now trained 100 dogs to step into the scanner and behave. One method he used in the training was playing with the dogs while scanner sounds were on, in order to normalize them.

When that problem was solved, they looked at the dogs' reward centers in the brain. The professor's thinking went that those centers would light up when dogs were presented with stuff they like, say, food and praise, just the same as they — the reward centers — fire up when humans are doing or receiving something pleasurable. 

Not only were there interesting results on whether dogs have more activity in their brains when given food versus praise, but the episode is also worth listening to for the adorable dogs and the stories that come along with them.