Dogs And Humans – Unique Connection

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Do you feel you have a special connection with your pooch? Well, you do.

Not only are dogs the only species able to communicate with us using their cute little puppy eyes, they use the same brain area for voices and they react in similar ways when processing emotional cues.

Dr. Andics, of MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group in Budapest, says the social environment of dogs and humans is similar, and their results show they may also use similar brain mechanisms to process social information, which may explain why the two species make such successful companions.

The study conducted by Dr. Andics suggests specialized voice areas in the brain began developing over 100 million years ago, when humans and dogs last shared an ancestor. This is much earlier than expected and previously thought.

To conduct their unique experiment, which involved taking the same functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans of both humans and dogs, the researchers trained 11 dogs to lie still in the scanner.

The fMRI images showed that the same areas in the brains of both dogs and humans respond to vocal sounds.

“Our findings also reveal that sensitivity to vocal emotional valence cues engages similarly located non-primary auditory regions in dogs and humans.” For instance, when the participants heard “happy” sounds, in both species, the same part of the brain lit up more than for “unhappy” sounds.

However, dog and human brains respond differently to non-vocal sounds. In dogs, 48% of their sound-sensitive brain regions responded more strongly to non-vocal sounds than vocal sounds, compared with only 3% of sound-sensitive brain regions in humans.

Dr. Andics says their method offers a completely new approach to looking at dogs’ brains and how they work, so we can “begin to understand how our best friend is looking at us and navigating in our social environment.”

This study is huge step in helping understand how our four-legged friends are so good at sensing our feelings.