Have you ever wondered what your pet dog or cat was thinking? Well, I certainly have. My name is Dito Mann, and this is my story on how I decoded my dog’s brain. 

It all started one day, when I was looking at my dog, Loki, and he was laying on the couch, staring at something. As soon as I sat down next to him, his head jerked upward and he turned to face me. He looked at me for a few seconds, and then fell back down onto the couch. I thought to myself, “What just happened? Why did Loki look at me and then just decide to lay back down?” I pondered about this for a moment, and then brushed it off as something unimportant, but there was still a lingering feeling of uncertainty. I began to wonder about what exactly made Loki jerk his head upward and then lie back down. I decided that I wanted to know more about my dog’s brain so that I could understand more about him and how his body worked. My parents and I did some research on how we could study Loki’s brain more, and we came across a program that lets younger students pair up in a mentorship with college students. We immediately signed up for the program, and soon enough, I began to meet with Mason Usher.

My mentor was Mason Usher, a university student who is studying neuroscience, and we began to craft a project to record data about Loki and then look at fMRI data of other dogs to see if we could guess what parts of Loki’s brain were getting stimulated. Our project was simple: First, I would buy 2 identical rope toys for Loki. Then, I would expose him to the toys at different times of the day and record how many seconds it took for him to become uninterested in the toy. Then, after two days of recording the data, I would add a kibble scent to one of the toys and keep on recording the data for the next five days to see if anything changed once we added the smell. I was particularly interested in doing this experiment because I was very interested in the parts of Loki’s brain that relate to attention span and decisions because I think that knowing what leads Loki to make decisions leads to having a lot more information of what Loki thinks and what his brain is doing in different situations. Once we worked out all the kinks, we were ready to start our project.

I began recording Loki’s attention span, and he seemed to be really enjoying himself and his new toys. He took a particular interest in one of the toys, and I couldn’t figure out why. I began to think about why he liked that toy more than the other one, and then I remembered that it was the toy I first introduced to him. He must have had a deeper connection with the first toy rather than the second. I decided to discuss this with Mason, and he thought the same thing that I did; that it was because I introduced it to Loki first. I nevertheless continued the experiment, and Loki was having a blast. I eventually applied the kibble scent to toy number two, and Loki began to show much more interest in toy number 2 than in toy number 1. I presented my findings to Mason, and we continued with the next step in our plan, which was comparing what we had found to dog brain fMRI data to see if there were any key regions of interest that we assume were stimulated when Loki played with the toys.

Before looking at fMRI data, you first have to know what exactly you are looking at. fMRI stands for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. What that means is that an MRI sends magnetic pulses through a person’s body, detects blood flow and activity of neurons, creates images of what it passed through, and by uploading these images to a computer, scientists can actively see what is happening in a person’s brain. But even with all the new technology we have at our disposal, navigating fMRI data is still very hard. It’s not one of those things that people are born with the capability to do. You have to learn and practice to get it right. That being said, I had a tough time trying to make sense of the fMRI data myself, considering that I had no previous experience with fMRI data. Mason helped me a lot throughout the process, and he even made the fMRI data easier to look at by doing certain preprocessing steps. We studied the brain images, and then decided on three key areas of interest; the Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the Orbitofrontal cortex, and the Olfactory bulb. We decided on these regions because the Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is what dogs use for controlling impulses and responses and it plays a role in mood regulation. We also chose the Orbitofrontal cortex because it plays a role in decision making and reward processing, and we chose the Olfactory bulb because it helps Loki interpret the different smells of the world around him. All three of these regions together help Loki make the decision of how much time he would spend playing with the toys, and that is a crucial, if not the most important, part of our project. We looked at the fMRI data of one dog in a study, and it was pretty hard just figuring out where the brain was, let alone the brain regions, but we figured it out. Once we had studied this dog’s brain more, we came upon a conclusion of what happens in Loki’s brain when he plays with the toys.                          

When Loki goes outside to play with the toys, there is a sequence of events that needs to happen for identifying toys around him. First, Loki smells the toys. Dogs have an amazing sense of smell, and it is their primary sense, which means they rely on it to interpret the world. He recognizes the distinct smell of each toy, and he begins to get excited. Olfactory receptors in Loki’s nose pick up on different scent particles, and they transmit what they smelled to the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb is one of the largest parts of a dog’s brain. It takes up roughly 10 percent of its brain, and for a reason. To give you a sense of how crazy that number is, the olfactory bulb in humans is less than 1 percent of their entire brain! Dogs have one of the strongest senses of smell of any animal, and they can use their sense of smell to gather an abundance of information about the world around them. The olfactory bulb processes all that is going on, and sends different messages to different parts of the brain.

Let’s say that Loki smelled some food. His nose would recognize the scent of the food, and it would tell that to the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb would then check in with three different parts of his brain. First, it would check with Loki’s eyes to see if Loki can see and affirm that it is food he is smelling and not something else. Then, the olfactory bulb would rely on the hippocampus to check Loki’s memories to see if the food is something he is allowed to eat or not. Finally, the hippocampus would verify or veto the smell, and it would tell the prefrontal cortex to send messages to Loki’s muscles to move and eat the food, or move away and just ignore whatever smelled like food. All of this comes together in the fraction of a second, and it would surprise you how many of these decisions Loki makes in a very short amount of time. Before this project, I had no idea that Loki did all of these amazing things daily, but now that I have learned about my dog, I understand and can connect with him a lot more than before. In the end, I concluded that Loki was startled when I sat down because he smelled something new or off about me that day, but then decided that it was safe and that the new smell wasn’t important. Moving forward in the future, I will remember to clean Loki’s bed with no-scent soap and to use scented toys to play with him, since now I know that smell is a huge part of the way my dog carries himself through his daily life, and it will definitely help him feel happier and healthier if I pay attention to smell when I am around him.

Brains are easily the most complex and important organs, and they really do their job well. Did you know that brains are actually much bigger than they seem? All of those little ridges and bumps that you see when looking at a brain are actually folds in the tissue that makes up a brain, and there are hundreds more beneath the surface. If you unfolded the cerebral cortex of the brain out onto a table, it would be roughly the size of a newspaper page, and that’s only one part of the brain! After doing this project, I realized that dogs and humans aren’t really that different after all. I realized through my research that we both have a similar way of interpreting the world around us, but humans mainly use sight while dogs mainly use smell. We both have similar brain structures. I believe that the human and dog brain should be something that isn’t a very foreign, unknown subject, rather it should be something that the kids of the world can learn and read about and be fascinated by and the adults and scientists can explore and support. Imagine if a child came home from school, so excited to tell their parents about their cool brain and how it worked. Imagine if that same child began pursuing neuroscience and created the first ever machine that let owners be able to talk to their pets. I believe that in this rapidly technologically advancing world, neuroscience is a big part of the future, and we should all be able to take part in it.