I ordered this in a batch of other books from Amazon last year ......suckered in by the title! Then I realised Gregory Berns was going to experiment on dogs by placing them in an MRI machine .....conscious ,so it dropped down in appeal those who have experienced am MRI will know where I am coming from! You know what ,I really enjoyed it!It doesn't give scientific ,conclusive proof that our dogs love us ( we all know they do anyway of course!)but he discovers some interesting brain activity patterns that shows they try to understand our physical movements and adapt to them and how they respond to our smell when we aren't with them..... A lot of what he wanted to answer was actually peripheral to me ,I was more taken by the sensitive way he handled the dogs training in prep for the live experiments...... His protocol involved only using 'pet' dogs not bred for purpose lab dogs ( makes sense bearing in mind the title : bit I'd have had to stop right there if it had been otherwise :-\) he ensured the dogs were accorded the same status as human children,in that their owners signed a consent form as parents would and the dogs were allowed to opt out at any point if they showed distress in the machine, a bit like a human baby could if it cried excessively. He clicker trained his own dog to be comfortable and still in the machine and used hand signals in the first set of scans ( coincidental to the timing of Pippas training articles this week but making that part all the more interesting to me) All in all I really enjoyed it.....apart from tears at the end ...from an inevitable but unexpected source :'( I'm not a scientist at all,but the jargon was easy for me to understand ....I'm writing this without looking up the response he had to his published paper.....I'm going to do that now .......
