“That’s really cool! I don’t own a dog, so I’m not for sure [if it’s true], but I know cats don’t have [that ability] because my cat doesn’t listen very well”, Ray said. But there’s more to their intelligence that we need to know about, more than what we already know. He says, “To find that dogs have a very similar neural mechanism to tell apart meaningful words from meaningless sound sequences is, I think, really awesome”. Scientists in Hungary have recently recorded this fact.
Advertisement
A new study conducted from scientists at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest has taken some well-trained pooches and put them into an MRI machine to watch their brain activity.
Traditional wisdom holds that it’s not so much what you say to your dog as how you say it that counts – that tone, in other words, is everything.
BRIAN HARE: For decades, there has been an idea that a big shift occurred during human evolution where we became more left hemispheric dominant in processing communication.
ENIKÖ KUBINYILike humans, dogs use the left sides of their brains to processes words and the right side to process intonation.
She continues, “The human brain not only separately analyzes what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning”. This was according to Dr. Attila Andics, lead researcher of the study. “To find that dogs have a very similar neural mechanism to tell apart meaningful words from meaningless sound sequences is, I think, really unbelievable”.
When the dog’s brain detected a meaningful word combined with praising intonation, this activated the reward centre. Meaningless words spoken in an encouraging voice, or meaningful words in a neutral tone, didn’t have the same effect.
That means the dogs only registered they were being praised when both the words and intonation were positive. “Praise can work as a reward only if both word meaning and intonation match”. The dogs processed the vocabulary in the left hemisphere of their brains, which is where humans also process the meaning of words.
Andics said the findings suggest that the mental ability to process language evolved earlier than previously believed and that what sets humans apart from other species is the invention of words.
Advertisement
Next step will be for humans to understand what dogs are saying to us.
