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    What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience
    What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience
    What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience
    Audiobook14 hours

    What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience

    Written by Gregory Berns

    Narrated by Joe Hempel

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    What is it like to be a dog? A bat? Or a dolphin? To find out, neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his team began with a radical step: they taught dogs to go into an MRI scanner-completely awake. They discovered what makes dogs individuals with varying capacities for self-control, different value systems, and a complex understanding of human speech. And dogs were just the beginning. In What It's Like to Be a Dog, Berns explores the fascinating inner lives of wild animals from dolphins and sea lions to the extinct Tasmanian tiger. Much as Silent Spring transformed how we thought about the environment, so What It's Like to Be a Dog will fundamentally reshape how we think about-and treat-animals. Groundbreaking and deeply humane, it is essential listening for animal lovers of all stripes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 29, 2017
    ISBN9781541486232
    What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience
    Author

    Gregory Berns

    Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, is the distinguished professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University. Dr Berns’s research is frequently the subject of popular media coverage, including articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

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    Reviews for What It's Like to Be a Dog

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    • 3/5
      The book doesn’t have much to do with the title. The author is all over the place...has a lot to say but the absolute mix of writing styles and topics makes it hard to enjoy.
    • 4/5
      Thinking Like Animals = Better Communications?What It’s Like To Be A Dog is all over the place. Gregory Berns is passionate about dogs, but his life is neurological investigation. He uses various flavors of MRI to examine and record the brains of all kinds of animals. He has gone to the point of obtaining the pickled brains of extinct animals to scan and analyze. Several chapters deal with his adventures in bureaucracy, trying to borrow the brains and figure out how they worked. Far more than dogs, that is what the book is about.He does keep coming back to dogs, though. Berns and company devised numerous experiments to see if dogs could pass tests that two year old humans ace. Importantly, this is not to prove humans are smarter, but to see how much dogs process their own observations. He patiently trains the dogs to enter and stay in MRI machines, despite the enclosure and the racket, and to follow directions. It means endless repetitions in dry runs. The idea is to find out if dogs can transfer their attention as directed. Or what has priority: praise or food? In that way, we might understand how dogs think.Dogs don’t think in labels like humans do. Humans have a name for every little thing. Dogs don’t care. For example, given a choice to pick out a close substitute for a specifically named toy, a dog will look at shape last. It will first look for substitutes of the same general size, and then of the same texture, the very opposite of what humans would do. That should color how we think about communicating with dogs.Dogs are not about things; they are about actions. They will follow instructions to do things all day long. But telling them to select an object by name shows most unsatisfactory results. Dogs expect/hope that commands are for actions. If we can change our approach to recognize that bias, perhaps we can communicate better with them, Berns says.There are a bunch of fascinating sidelights, too. Dolphins, another subject of brains scans, process sound over 100 times faster than humans. Sound travels at 3355 mph under water (Sound travels at 768 mph in the air), so fast that it is near useless to use slow, low level sounds which echo back all at the same time. Dolphins instead employ high pitched sounds in the range of 100 KHz. Meanwhile, humans can only hear up to about 20 Khz, and dogs 40 Khz. Dolphins hear through their jaws, and can distinguish objects a fraction of a millimeter that way. They are far more accurate hearing than humans are with sight.The book ends in a totally unexpected way, totally unconnected to the title. Berns is a big animal rights activist. He has the greatest respect for them, and pushes to end the suffering humans inflict on them. He goes on for pages about Dog Lab in med school and how he regrets it. He also sees the decline and fall of humans, as DNA editing will allow custom humans to be produced at will. This is a wild conclusion to a book that already has relatively little to do with the title. It shows Berns to be a multifaceted scientist with a lot of heart. But it’s not really about what it’s like to be a dog.David Wineberg