"Scientists find it hard to accept the idea that animals have feelings," says neuroscientist Gregory Berns. "Most people who live with dogs understand this intuitively."
Dogs Have Feelings—Here's How We Know
Dogs can be trained to sit and stay in an MRI.
Do our pets love us—or just the treats we give them? To find out, Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, trained dogs to go inside an MRI scanner. He managed to map their brains as they responded to different stimuli and describes the surprising results in his new book, What It’s Like to Be a Dog.
When National Geographic caught up with Berns by phone in his office in Atlanta, he explained why it’s hard to tell if dogs understand human language, what he hopes to learn from the brains of animals threatened with extinction, and why sea lions love to dance. [Learn why dogs come in so many shapes and sizes.]
About five years ago I
