A recent study by the magazine Current Biology has proved that just like humans, dogs have a part of their brain devoted to the voice. This definitely helps us to understand the relationship between dogs and men!

Teaching Eleven Dogs to Stay Still

To be able to do a MRI scan, the dogs had to be very still for a while, so researchers taught eleven dogs to do this! This has allowed the team to simultaneously compare the brains of a dog and a man.

During the MRI scan, the researchers made the dog and man listen to different sounds including; crying, laughing and barking. This was to stimulate the brain and to analyse the activity in the brain of the two subjects.

The sounds that stir us

The results were that the areas stimulated while hearing the sounds in the dog and man are exactly the same! There was more reaction in the brain area of the dog when he heard another dog and more reaction in the man’s brain when he heard a human voice. They also found that men and dogs deal with the sounds the same way emotionally. In other words, the emotion they felt was the same.

Processing Information

According to a member of the research group, dogs with a similar social environment to men use the same areas of the brain to process information! There are however some differences. In dogs, 48% of the brain is sensitive to noises compared to only 3% in humans.

Source: Huffingtonpost
Photo: Kintaivo

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