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Your Dog Understands What You Say, So Don’t Be an Asshole

Since dogs have been socialized with humans for thousands of years, they are more alert to what people say to them and how.

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A report in the journal Science suggested that the reward pathway in the brains of dogs lit up when they heard both applauding positive words along with an approving intonation, but the case was opposite when they came across random words spoken to them in an applauding tone or positive words spoken in a tiresome flat tone.

That would mean the basic brain chemistry needed to process language may be much older than the human species, and is likely present in other animals.

DrAndics mentioned that their findings have suggested that our furry friends can also perform all that, and quite similar brain mechanisms are used by them.

“But there was no difference for meaningless words, and this effect was independent from intonation”.

In that study, similar patterns were found in dog and human brains, but a left dorsal auditory region of the dog brains responded stronger than the human brains to the dog sounds. And when they heard words of praise said in a praising tone, another important part of their brain lit up: the reward area.

Commenting on the findings of the study, the first author of the study and a neuroscientist at Eötvös Loránd University, Attila Andics, in a statement said, “It shows that for dogs, a nice praise can very well work as a reward, but it works best if both words and intonation match”. So, they’re hearing the pitch of what we say, but they’re also attending at some level to the meaning, especially to familiar words. They process language using the same regions of the brain as people, according to the researchers, whose paper was published in Science.

Mark Vette has taught dogs how to fly and how to drive, and he’s a big believer of the research. That means they understand words differently from intonations – which have always been thought as the reason that dogs can respond to commands.

Neutral words such as “however” and “none the less” were also used. “I’m convinced dogs understand some things, but their semantic space is not constructed like ours”. This new study proves otherwise, showing that dogs use both brain hemispheres to determine what a phrase actually means. “Do they process the tone of our words only or do they process the words as well?”

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Andics also said that this study is further proof that the human brain is not as unique in its workings as humans like to think.

So Dogs Can Understand Everything We're Telling Them