Gregory Berns Knows What Your Dog Is Thinking (It’s Sweet)<br />The sea lions taught me that consciousness disorders in animals can look very similar to consciousness disorders in people.<br />As a neuroscientist, I’d seen how M. R.I.<br />studies helped us understand which parts of the human brain were involved in emotional processes.<br />The big impediment doing this type of testing was to find some way to get dogs into an M. R.I.<br />and get them to hold still for long enough to obtain useful images.<br />I thought, “Gee, if the military can train dogs to get into noisy helicopters, it might be possible to get them into noisy M. R.I.s.”<br />To find out what dogs think and feel.<br />This means that dogs aren’t just learning from being around us that human faces are important — they are born to look at faces.<br />In fact, the aggregate of my research has made me realize how similar many animals are to us.
