Tedspresso - Dogs

Tedspresso - Ted talks condensed into a page of digestible information. If you like what you read, the link to the full talk is at the bottom of the page.

How dogs love us | Dr. Gregory Burns Length | 18:02

Key takeaways -

• Dogs have many of the same feelings and motivations that we do

• Dr Burns used MRIs to measure the active regions of dogs’ brains in response to rewards

• Dogs’ brains are typically the size of a plum or a lemon and they have many similarities to human brains

• The results showed that dogs have representations of humans and they can remember and care like we do

• Dogs’ brains are usually more active when rewards are given by an owner, displaying their ability to form connections and long term bonds with humans

• Scans provide a neural biomarker of a dog’s personality profile, e.g golden retrievers show different results to pugs

• An example of where these scans can be used is with service dogs, these are usually very difficult and expensive to train and have a high failure rate during training. If potential training dogs undergo scans before training it would give an indication pf their likelihood of success during training.

Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0Y-GU3JqiQ

Quotes -

"The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog." - Mark T