"Inside the Mind of a Dog" delivers on the promises in its title, both stated and implied. The movie is packed with adorable dogs of every conceivable breed; it puts readers inside the mind of humanity's best friend; and — to address a question it poses at the very end — it lets us know whether or not dogs truly love humans.
"There are things that people can do with their dogs to improve their relationships."
"There is a lot of what we call convergence between dogs and humans," Dr. Vanessa Woods, the director of the Puppy Kindergarten at Duke University, told Salon. Woods, who is featured in the documentary, mentioned that humans will often notice a dog staring at them quietly and not understand what it means. Woods explained that this relates to the fact that dogs and humans both rely on eye contact when they are young to connect with their parents. Even as adults, humans and dogs still experience a rush of oxytocin — the so-called "love hormone" — when they make sustained eye contact with other individuals they care about. In a very real sense, they are hugging humans with their eyes.
"Basically they've hijacked this oxytocin loop," Woods said. "When your dog stares at you and you stare back at your dog, it increases your oxytocin and it increases their oxytocin. Basically they've taken over this neurological loop that we developed between our children and ourselves. And for another species to do that is quite extraordinary."
Woods' observation about translating dog stares appears in "Inside the Mind of a Dog," and the documentary (narrated by Rob Lowe, who takes the opportunity to show off his own pets) also includes many other tips so that dog owners can enter their friends' minds. We are informed that dogs bark to express emotions or recruit a human's attention — but that a bark is never "just a bark." In a high stress situation, dogs will bark at a higher pitch; if their high pitch bark repeats itself without pausing, they are in a state of outright distress; if they bark and pause, that means they still have some cognitive ability. Then again, some dogs are just more inclined to bark than others based on their breed, with Siberian huskies particularly notorious for being whiny.
Similarly, the movie teaches viewers that dogs communicate with their tails: loose equals curiosity, tight means anxiety, tucked or wagging low suggests stress and helicopter tail and/or butt wiggle indicates a very positive emotional experience (such as love for their owner). Scientists have even learned that if dogs' tails wag to the right, it means they have a positive association with a specific human being — suggesting, once again, affection.
Although dogs only have 16 different facial expressions (compared to humans' 27 expressions), they use their eyes, barks and tails to make up for their limited facial expressiveness. Also like humans, canine intelligence is built around problem-solving in the world around them, even though they rely on a different primary sense (smell) than humans (vision). If dogs did not share this basic intelligence with humans, they would not work with us so closely... or be so similar to us.
For instance, some researchers suggest that dogs can have ADHD just like humans. Additionally, puppies whose mothers let them figure out problems on their own wind up being better guide dogs than puppies whose mothers micromanage them, an observation that also has parallels to human experiences. The very fact that dogs are the most diverse animal on Earth is because they were subject to humanity's genetic meddling. (The movie does not mention the ugly connection between the history of dog breeding and many dogs' chronic health issues, as well as the dog breeding movement's ties to the racist eugenics movement.)
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.
"Understanding how the puppy mind develops helps us manage our expectations of what puppies can do or learn while they are growing up."
According to Dr. Brian Hare, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, all of the movie's pieces of trivia add up to a single important takeaway, which is that doggie brains are far more complex than the popular perception often admits.
"We now have overwhelming evidence that dogs have multiple intelligences — these different types of cognition already emerge in puppies but first appear at different times," Hare said. "Some cognitive skills appear early, like the ability to read human gestures, and other cognitive skills, like self-control, come online a bit later. Understanding how the puppy mind develops helps us manage our expectations of what puppies can do or learn while they are growing up."
Some can grow up to be guide dogs or perform other services, like rescuing trapped people or detecting diseases including cancer, diabetes and Parkinson's disease. There are dogs that can learn hundreds of words (one learned up to 1,000), while others have very limited verbal comprehension. In some cases, there are dogs best suited to simply serve as a happy companion to a human family. As people learn more about dogs, though, scientists like Hare hope it will be easier for scientists to train large numbers of smart canines to help people.
"Dogs have more jobs than ever, but there is a shortage of professionally-trained dogs," Hare said. "A big factor behind the shortage is the difficulty of knowing what job any individual dog might be best at doing. The holy grail is to use a puppies' performance on our cognitive games to predict which job they will be best suited for as an adult. Will they be best at helping someone with a physical disability, a child with autism, search and rescue, or a veteran with PTSD?"
We need your help to stay independent
Hare added, "If we can predict this early in a dogs life we will have much more success training them and we will greatly increase the supply of dogs available for all the amazing jobs they do."
Just as learning more about dog minds will help humans train dogs, it will also make it easier for dogs to train humans. "Inside the Mind of a Dog" reminds us that the famous "puppy dog eyes" exist because dogs intentionally make the whites of their eyes (or the sclera) more visible to humans.
"There are things that people can do with their dogs to improve their relationships," Woods said. "We have this game in the documentary where you put a treat in a container and then close it. When puppies played this game, just for five minutes every two weeks, they actually had twice as much eye contact with the experimenter, which is really important for dogs and their people. Just by playing little fun games, it can really improve the relationship that people have with their dogs."
Shares