Read Online How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain by Gregory Berns - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Gregory Berns
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time sitting still.”
Kat and I had already heard about his method of making the kids walk laps around the hallway to burn off energy. Maybe this helped some students concentrate, but it took valuable time away from Helen actually learning science.
“Can we move her to a different period?” I asked.
“We can check, but that would require changing her whole schedule.”
“Can you at least move her to the front of the class so she can hear better?”
I think he realized that this was the least painful way to get rid of us.
“Sure, I can do that.”
It was evident that he had been through this type of conference countless times before and that he had heard it all. I felt some small victory in serving notice that we cared about our daughter and that we would not sit idly while she slipped through the cracks of the public school system.
When we got home, Helen was in her room doing homework. I sat with her on her bed. Lyra jumped up to join us.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“Not so good,” I said.
A look of embarrassment flashed across Helen’s face. “What did you do?”
“We tried to get you switched to a different period, but that wasn’t going to happen. The best we could do was getting you moved closer to the front of the room.”
Helen nodded and stroked Lyra’s head. Lyra grinned in delight.
“I think he forgets to teach your period some of the material,” I explained. “You’re just going to have to make a lot of flash cards.”
Science is about questioning how the universe works and discovering new things, not memorizing a series of facts out of a textbook. Science constantly changes as we learn more about the world we live in. What could be more exciting than that? It saddened me that Helen had to learn science with all the life sucked out of it.
Helen continued to smooth out Lyra’s fur.
“Do you think Lyra knows how I feel?” she asked.
“I think she does,” I said. “But hopefully we can prove that through the Dog Project.”
Lyra provided a great deal of comfort to Helen. As the two of them cuddled together, I was struck by their perfect symbiosis. As a golden retriever, Lyra had been honed through generations of selective breeding to get along with humans, especially children. Although the Dog Project had been conceived as an effort to discover what dogs like Lyra and Callie were thinking, Helen’s reaction reminded me that the dog-human relationship is a two-way street. We couldn’t consider the dog brain without taking into account dogs’ effect on humans.
At a superficial level, you can state the obvious: humans like dogs. They provide companionship. They serve as working and utility animals. They hunt. They guard. They are soft and warm and feel good against the skin. But, as I was trying to convey to Helen, science is about asking why things are the way they are.
The scientific study of dogs’ effect on humans has been, until recently, almost nonexistent. Florence Nightingale, the matriarch of nursing, was one of the first to argue for the role of animals in improving human health, writing, “A small pet animal is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.” But it wasn’t until the last decade, when animal-assisted therapy became more accepted as a treatment for human illness, that researchers began measuring the effect of dogs on humans. Even so, the results have been mixed. For one thing, how can you conduct a double-blind study where neither the researcher nor the patient knows what treatment is being given, if one set of patients gets to play with dogs while the other doesn’t? Double-blind studies are the gold standard in medicine because of the well-known placebo effect. Across the board, for physical and mental illnesses, up to one-third of patients will get better if they believe the treatment they are receiving is effective, even if it is nothing more than a sugar pill.
Demonstrating that dogs and animals in
Kat and I had already heard about his method of making the kids walk laps around the hallway to burn off energy. Maybe this helped some students concentrate, but it took valuable time away from Helen actually learning science.
“Can we move her to a different period?” I asked.
“We can check, but that would require changing her whole schedule.”
“Can you at least move her to the front of the class so she can hear better?”
I think he realized that this was the least painful way to get rid of us.
“Sure, I can do that.”
It was evident that he had been through this type of conference countless times before and that he had heard it all. I felt some small victory in serving notice that we cared about our daughter and that we would not sit idly while she slipped through the cracks of the public school system.
When we got home, Helen was in her room doing homework. I sat with her on her bed. Lyra jumped up to join us.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“Not so good,” I said.
A look of embarrassment flashed across Helen’s face. “What did you do?”
“We tried to get you switched to a different period, but that wasn’t going to happen. The best we could do was getting you moved closer to the front of the room.”
Helen nodded and stroked Lyra’s head. Lyra grinned in delight.
“I think he forgets to teach your period some of the material,” I explained. “You’re just going to have to make a lot of flash cards.”
Science is about questioning how the universe works and discovering new things, not memorizing a series of facts out of a textbook. Science constantly changes as we learn more about the world we live in. What could be more exciting than that? It saddened me that Helen had to learn science with all the life sucked out of it.
Helen continued to smooth out Lyra’s fur.
“Do you think Lyra knows how I feel?” she asked.
“I think she does,” I said. “But hopefully we can prove that through the Dog Project.”
Lyra provided a great deal of comfort to Helen. As the two of them cuddled together, I was struck by their perfect symbiosis. As a golden retriever, Lyra had been honed through generations of selective breeding to get along with humans, especially children. Although the Dog Project had been conceived as an effort to discover what dogs like Lyra and Callie were thinking, Helen’s reaction reminded me that the dog-human relationship is a two-way street. We couldn’t consider the dog brain without taking into account dogs’ effect on humans.
At a superficial level, you can state the obvious: humans like dogs. They provide companionship. They serve as working and utility animals. They hunt. They guard. They are soft and warm and feel good against the skin. But, as I was trying to convey to Helen, science is about asking why things are the way they are.
The scientific study of dogs’ effect on humans has been, until recently, almost nonexistent. Florence Nightingale, the matriarch of nursing, was one of the first to argue for the role of animals in improving human health, writing, “A small pet animal is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.” But it wasn’t until the last decade, when animal-assisted therapy became more accepted as a treatment for human illness, that researchers began measuring the effect of dogs on humans. Even so, the results have been mixed. For one thing, how can you conduct a double-blind study where neither the researcher nor the patient knows what treatment is being given, if one set of patients gets to play with dogs while the other doesn’t? Double-blind studies are the gold standard in medicine because of the well-known placebo effect. Across the board, for physical and mental illnesses, up to one-third of patients will get better if they believe the treatment they are receiving is effective, even if it is nothing more than a sugar pill.
Demonstrating that dogs and animals in
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