A lot of great ideas in this book and possible tales to go with them, but they are never realized. I felt like each chapter led you down a path that ultimately never went anywhere but onto the next chapter. Maybe this is all because the science is only beginning and we have yet to see what it’s really like to be a dog, if we ever really can. The last two chapters were great and put us where we belong on the earth sharing limited resources with all the other species in such a way that our extinction is very likely. ( )

I don’t understand the deeper intricacies of neuroscience, but I am fascinated by it, and as an animal lover, I found this book to be particularly interesting.
I read a few reviews of people who didn’t finish because they thought he lost focus or didn’t deliver what they were hoping to get, based on the title. I wonder if the author had put the last chapter of the book, Dog Lab, at the beginning of the book, if it would have made a difference in how many people stuck with it until the end. I thought the chapter went a long way toward putting his studies, especially the Dog Project, in context, and it very clearly explained his motivation for starting the project. Except for his projections for human evolution at the very end, which struck me as pretty weird, I was on the same page as the author with his views of how we should approach our attitudes about and interactions with animals.
He alternated between being technical beyond my understanding and using a friendlier narrative style that at times felt a little indulgent. If I glossed over some of the details, I found it fairly easy to follow.
I don’t know how much was proved through these experiments, but I appreciate the motivation behind them and the careful standards they set for them.
Overall, a fascinating read for animal lovers, and I recommend reading the last chapter first. ( )

Thinking Like Animals = Better Communications?

What It’s Like To Be A Dog is all over the place. Gregory Berns is passionate about dogs, but his life is neurological investigation. He uses various flavors of MRI to examine and record the brains of all kinds of animals. He has gone to the point of obtaining the pickled brains of extinct animals to scan and analyze. Several chapters deal with his adventures in bureaucracy, trying to borrow the brains and figure out how they worked. Far more than dogs, that is what the book is about.

He does keep coming back to dogs, though. Berns and company devised numerous experiments to see if dogs could pass tests that two year old humans ace. Importantly, this is not to prove humans are smarter, but to see how much dogs process their own observations. He patiently trains the dogs to enter and stay in MRI machines, despite the enclosure and the racket, and to follow directions. It means endless repetitions in dry runs. The idea is to find out if dogs can transfer their attention as directed. Or what has priority: praise or food? In that way, we might understand how dogs think.

Dogs don’t think in labels like humans do. Humans have a name for every little thing. Dogs don’t care. For example, given a choice to pick out a close substitute for a specifically named toy, a dog will look at shape last. It will first look for substitutes of the same general size, and then of the same texture, the very opposite of what humans would do. That should color how we think about communicating with dogs.

Dogs are not about things; they are about actions. They will follow instructions to do things all day long. But telling them to select an object by name shows most unsatisfactory results. Dogs expect/hope that commands are for actions. If we can change our approach to recognize that bias, perhaps we can communicate better with them, Berns says.

There are a bunch of fascinating sidelights, too. Dolphins, another subject of brains scans, process sound over 100 times faster than humans. Sound travels at 3355 mph under water (Sound travels at 768 mph in the air), so fast that it is near useless to use slow, low level sounds which echo back all at the same time. Dolphins instead employ high pitched sounds in the range of 100 KHz. Meanwhile, humans can only hear up to about 20 Khz, and dogs 40 Khz. Dolphins hear through their jaws, and can distinguish objects a fraction of a millimeter that way. They are far more accurate hearing than humans are with sight.

The book ends in a totally unexpected way, totally unconnected to the title. Berns is a big animal rights activist. He has the greatest respect for them, and pushes to end the suffering humans inflict on them. He goes on for pages about Dog Lab in med school and how he regrets it. He also sees the decline and fall of humans, as DNA editing will allow custom humans to be produced at will.

This is a wild conclusion to a book that already has relatively little to do with the title. It shows Berns to be a multifaceted scientist with a lot of heart. But it’s not really about what it’s like to be a dog.

David Wineberg ( )