Does your dog go nuts when outside or if it hears a noise? Maybe he just seems to have convenient hearing. Let’s go inside the minds of dogs and find out why.
Over the years attempts have been made to understand what goes on inside the minds of dogs. Scientists have observed dogs in their natural state and through experiments. However, a Hungarian scientist has recently put conscious dogs through MRI scans in order to gain a better understanding of how they process information.
MRI scanners have been used in larger veterinary hospitals as a diagnostic tool, but the dogs are usually put under anesthesia. This special group of dogs was trained to lie perfectly still while in the noisy scanner.
So far, the scientists have found that in the dog’s auditory area of the brain approximately 39% of it responds to other dogs’ vocalizations, 13% to human voices, and a whopping 48% to environmental sounds. In contrast, our brains respond to other human voices using 87% of the auditory cortex and only 3% is used to respond to our environment.
