Who am I?
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We treat dogs like they're part of the family. But do they know they are a different species, or do they think they're just short, four-legged people?
In this episode, canine cognition scientist Alexandra Horowitz helps us puzzle out this question. We’ll also find out what happens (or doesn’t) when a dog looks in the mirror. Dogs are always dozing, and we’ll check in to see if they are dreaming too. And, we take a quick trip around the world in the language of barks.
All that, plus a brand new Mystery Sound and moon-filled Moment of Um!
This episode was originally published Nov. 6, 2018. You can listen to that version here:
Do dogs know that they are dogs?
Audio Transcript
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EVELYN: You're listening to Brains On where we're series about being curious.
SUBJECT 1: Brains On is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
MOLLY BLOOM: Hey, Evelyn, did you have any trouble finding us?
EVELYN: Nope. The Brains On headquarters looks just like you said it would.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, it's pretty distinctive. Let's head up to the studio. Can you press that button right there?
ELEVATOR: Welcome to Brains On headquarters. Which floor?
MOLLY BLOOM: Elevator, please take us to the studio.
ELEVATOR: Holding doors for additional passengers.
[BARKS]
Of course, you're welcome.
EVELYN: Oh, what a cute dog.
MOLLY BLOOM: Is there a human coming to join this dog?
ELEVATOR: Next stop, Brains On board room.
MOLLY BLOOM: No, Elevator, I said the studio.
ELEVATOR: Yes, first stop boardroom. Second stop, studio.
EVELYN: Is the dog going to the boardroom?
ELEVATOR: Here we are. Brains On boardroom.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Hey, Molly. Hey, Evelyn. I don't remember adding you to the invite list for this meeting.
MOLLY BLOOM: What's going on in here, Sanden.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh, this is the monthly meeting of the brains on dog advisory council. I've been doing these for years.
EVELYN: I didn't know you had a brains on dog advisory council.
MOLLY BLOOM: Neither did I.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh yeah, I post about it all the time on my blog, which you guys totally read, right?
MOLLY BLOOM: Um.
[BARKS]
SANDEN TOTTEN: OK, with Archie here now joining us, the dog board is fully assembled.
[BARKS]
Oh, what's up, Penelope?
[BARKS]
Oh, don't mind the water on the floor. We had the octopus advisory council meeting in here yesterday. They have quite the sense of humor. Did they can turn off a light switch just by squirting water at it? What pranksters! Oh, speaking of which, Molly, that board, the octopus one, said they'd like to show a lot better if you had eight arms. So I told them you'd work on that.
MOLLY BLOOM: Sure.
SANDEN TOTTEN: OK. Let's get started. Take a seat, everybody. Oh, I'm sorry, I mean, sit. Good boys and girls. Stay. Good. Good. Good. Now we're going to share ideas on how to improve the show. Speak. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. One at a time. One at a time.
Molly, Evelyn, are you guys going to stay and help with this or--
MOLLY BLOOM: I kind of want to, but we have to get to the studio.
EVELYN: Yeah. Bye cutie fluffer faces.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Suit yourself. Oh, and if you see anyone from the alpaca advisory council wandering around, tell them that got pushed to Thursday. All right, bye.
ELEVATOR: Next stop, Brains On studio.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Here we have. Have a good taping.
MOLLY BLOOM: You're listening to Brains On from American Public Media. I'm Molly Bloom, and my co-host today is Evelyn from Horsham, Pennsylvania. Hi, Evelyn.
EVELYN: Hi, Molly. Thank you for having me today.
MOLLY BLOOM: Oh, thanks for being here. Now Evelyn, it is a very funny coincidence that Sanden chose today of all days to hold his dog advisory council meeting because this episode is based on a canine centric question that you sent in to us. What was that question?
EVELYN: Do dogs understand they're dogs the way a human knows it's a human.
MOLLY BLOOM: Tell us about your dogs.
EVELYN: I have a full sized goldendoodle and a mini sized goldendoodle. And the oldest one is named Titus, and then the younger one is named Pickle.
MOLLY BLOOM: So Evelyn, what made you think of this question? Do you remember?
EVELYN: I was lying in bed with my dog. And I was just thinking does he realize that he's a dog because sometimes I think he thinks he's one of us, as a human, because he lays in bed with us the way we lay in bed, he sits with us in a chair. But at the same time, he interacts with other dogs the way that they're supposed to, like they run around with each other, they play with each other, all the usual stuff.
MOLLY BLOOM: You can go to our Instagram Brains_On to see Evelyn's adorable dogs. And listeners, we'd like to see pictures of your dogs too. You can send them to us at brainson.org/contact, or post them on Instagram or Twitter and tag us. That's Brains_On. And bonus, we would love a caption telling us what you think is going through your dog's mind in that photo.
[BARKING]
Well, one step to understanding an animal state of mind is to find out if they are aware of themselves as distinct individuals in the world. It's called self-awareness. There's a famous test that's supposed to let if an animal is self aware, known as the mirror test.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It works like this. When an animal is asleep, you draw a little red mark on their face, somewhere prominent. Then when they wake up, you put them in a room with a mirror. And you wait to see if they notice.
SUBJECT 2: Hey, what's this red mark on my face?
MOLLY BLOOM: The theory is if they are self aware, they'll recognize themselves in the mirror, see the dot, and try to get it off, or at least move around to get a better look at it.
Is it a pimple? Am I going through animal puberty?
Most animals totally ignore the mirror and they never notice the dot only a few have been shown to recognize themselves in the reflection like dolphins, elephants, chimpanzees, and of course, humans. But humans can only do it after about the age of two.
SUBJECT 2: Oh, this dot won't come off. Why are all these people in lab coats staring at me? This is the last time I'm going to be a part of any study run by humans.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
EVELYN: So do dogs pass the mirror test? Are they self-aware?
MOLLY BLOOM: No, dogs do not pass this test. Sometimes dogs even think the reflection as another dog. But keep in mind it's not concrete proof of self-awareness. Dogs may still be self-aware. But this test might not be the best way to find out. Luckily, we know a scientist who spends a lot of time thinking about dogs and how they think.
EVELYN: Alexander Horowitz runs the dog cognition lab at Barnard College. Welcome, Alexandra.
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Thanks, Evelyn.
EVELYN: Do dogs understand they're dogs the way we understand we're humans?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Wow. It's such an interesting question. Do dogs understand they're dogs. Well, I think all the evidence that we have shows that they do, that they think about themselves as dogs and recognize other dogs as dogs. And this is a little surprising in some ways because dogs come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, from tiny, tiny toy chihuahuas to Great Danes and mastiffs.
But in studies, it looks like they recognize all of those types of breeds as one category of things, which is dogs. In fact, there was one study that showed dogs pictures of dog faces which all looked really different and also pictures of other animals faces like a cat and a cow and donkey. And these dogs have been trained to pick out the dog face and get a reward for it.
And then when they were shown all these faces, they had no trouble at all distinguishing who were the dogs from what were the other animals. So I think it's safe to say they know they're dogs.
EVELYN: Could dogs fail the mirror test and still be self aware?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: I love the idea of the mirror test that animals might look in the mirror like we do and notice, hey, that's me in the mirror, and especially notice if something is different about how they look. Now dogs don't pass that test. I don't know if you've ever seen a dog look in the mirror.
They're interested in the mirror. They seem to think there might be a dog there. But they don't seem to care if there's a little mark on their head, at least they don't seem to try to remove it. I thought though that this doesn't show that they don't think about themselves. I thought that maybe it was that they just don't care that much about how they look, because in fact, they are smelling creatures. They smell the world first just the way we see the world first.
So I designed a little study which I called an olfactory mirror which is just a smell test where I got a little bit of their scent, like a mirror reflection. And then I changed it a little bit. And I want to see if they were way more interested in that marked version of themself than just the regular picture of themselves. And they were. Sniffed that mark a lot longer as though they were looking in the mirror and noticing that there was something different, except for about their smell instead of about how they look.
So I think that they do have some kind of sense of themselves, but that is rooted in what they smell like, which is a little bit different than us because we might not even really what we smell like.
EVELYN: Why do dogs sometimes pick a favorite person in the family? Do you have any advice on how to become my dog's favorite person?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: [LAUGHS]
Well, I think there's no fail safe way to become a dog's favorite person, except to pay them a lot of attention. So if you think about a dog's life in a normal family, they spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen which have to do with them. That might be feeding, that has to do with them.
It might be play. If somebody is going to play with them or take them for a walk. There are lots of different ways we pay attention to our dogs. And the people who pay attention in most of those contexts, the ones who take them for the walks, the ones who notice when they're feeling rambunctious and want to play, the ones who give them their food wind up usually being the favorite person. So I'm pretty sure you can do that.
MOLLY BLOOM: And what kind of memories do dogs have? Can they remember their early lives as puppies? Can they remember how long ago you left them when you go away to work?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Well, we know that they have pretty good memories. It's not as though just because they can't talk to us about their memories they don't have memories. And we see this every day in their behavior. They recognize you even if you've been gone for a day or a week or a month, or a year. They can remember you and will recognize you pretty quickly.
But we don't know and it's hard to get evidence for how much of what we would call episodic memory that they have, in other words, memory for episodes of their life. So if they were at a shelter early in their life and it was a scary place-- and it's hard to test for episodic memories.
We can ask a person what do you remember about when you were four years old. But we can't ask an animal, a non-verbal animal that. So you have to get to it by just seeing do they recognize being in particular places, do they show familiarity with people who they've met once before. And it does look like they recognize people and places, just as we would expect. So their memory is pretty good.
EVELYN: What is the thing that people misunderstand about dogs' mind the most?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: It's a great question. I think that most people think of dogs as just like us only smaller, furrier, maybe a little less smart. But I think in many ways they think really differently than we do, and that starts with the fact that they smell the world, where we see it.
I should say to that question, you know, that I have a theory that they can pretty much tell how long you've been gone if you're gone the same amount each day by how much less of your smell is in the house, because everybody has a smell. You know, your house has a smell. It smells like the people who live in it and the dogs who live in it. Sometimes when I go on vacation, I come back, and I open the door and I smell dogs.
And that's because there's a smell in the house, and I don't usually notice it. But our smell would diminish over the course of the day. So if you're in the next room, your dog can smell it. If you leave the room, there's still some smell of you in that room, normal smell of person. But as the day goes on, the smell would dissipate. So in some sense, the dog can tell how long you've been gone by how much of your smell has disappeared from the house. Isn't that wild?
EVELYN: That's really cool. Thank you for answering our questions.
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Yeah, my pleasure.
SUBJECT 3: Brains On.
EVELYN: Molly, speaking of dogs, do you think we can sneak back into the dog advisory council meeting? They were all so cute.
MOLLY BLOOM: We can try, but we have something else to sneak in first. It's time for the mystery sound.
SUBJECT 4: Mystery sound.
MOLLY BLOOM: Here it is.
EVELYN: I don't know. Maybe someone pouring dog food into a bowl.
MOLLY BLOOM: Very good guess. We're going to be back with the answer in just a bit.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, listeners, I have a problem. I've had the same song in my head for weeks. It's driving me a little bananas. So I'm asking for your advice. Do you have an idea for how to get this song out of my head? What works for you when you have a song stuck in your head? Or maybe you'd like to invent a creative and/or hilarious method for me to try. Whatever your ideas, please record your advice for me and send it to us at brainson.org/contact.
And while you're there, you can also send us mystery sounds, drawings, and questions, like this one.
JOSIE: Hi, my name is Josie.
BECKETT: Hi, my name is Beckett. And we're from Tahoe City, California.
JOSIE: And our question is why does it look like the moon is following us as when we're driving in the car at night?
EVELYN: We'll be back with an answer to that question during our Moment of Um at the end of the show.
MOLLY BLOOM: Plus we'll read the latest group of listeners to be added to the Brains Honor Roll.
EVELYN: So keep listening.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[BARKING]
[KNOCKS]
SANDEN TOTTEN: Who is that?
EVELYN: It's me, Evelyn. Can I come in and hang out with you guys?
SANDEN TOTTEN: Sure. We're doing some testing.
EVELYN: Oh fun.
SANDEN TOTTEN: So everybody, OK, let's see, which of these questions would make a better episode topic? Why do cats lick themselves, or do dogs dream?
[BARKING]
Wow. Unanimous vote. Dog dreams it is.
EVELYN: Wait. Dogs dream? Are they like our dreams?
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh yeah, researchers think dogs totally dream.
[BARKING]
Well, Pepper the pointer over there says dogs are expert sleepers and their sleep is a lot like ours.
[BARKING]
Interesting. Ah.
EVELYN: What? What did she say?
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh, she's a dogs typically spend about half their day sleeping, which totally jealous. But scientists think they are only dreaming for a small portion of that. Also, we tend to sleep in kind of like one long chunk overnight. But dogs they get a lot of their sleeps in little chunks, you know, like catnaps.
[BARKING]
Oh sorry, sorry, dog naps.
[BARKING]
Oh, good point, Mr. Muffin.
EVELYN: What did he say now? I really need to learn to speak dog.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh, just that dogs have both rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep and non rapid eye movement sleep or non REM sleep, just like us. Us non dog people, we've been known to dream during both phases of sleep. But the dreams we typically remember, like the weird ones where your best friend shows up but they're also a bee, and they sting you. And you swell up and explode. But it's OK because it turns out you were really a pinata this whole time, and now there's candy and everyone gets candy. You know, those kind of dreams? Those are mostly associated with REM sleep.
EVELYN: Oh, interesting. Weird but interesting.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Yeah, dogs enter REM sleep about 20 minutes into a snooze. And that's when you might see their breathing change a little or their legs twitch. And that's a sign they're dreaming. In fact, there's a part of the brain called the pons that seems to keep humans and dogs from acting out their dreams when they sleep. Some studies have found that when that area is not working in dogs, they actually get up and do the stuff in their dreams, like they act it out.
EVELYN: Like what?
SANDEN TOTTEN: Well, a pointer dog might get up and point at dream birds, or a terrier might dig for dream rabbits in a dream warren.
[BARKING]
Oh, French Fry over there says she dreams about owning a small bed and breakfast in wine country where the dogs and people can go and sign up for spa treatments.
[BARKING]
Oh, I'm sorry. I misheard. She dreams about eating garbage. It sounds a lot like owning a bed and breakfast. It's easy to confuse the two.
[SQUEAKY TOY]
Time for our break. All right, everybody, take five. There are bowls of water on the table in the back and a fire hydrant outside if you need to use the restroom. We'll meet back here to review new taglines for the show. Right now the top contenders are-- let's see. Brains On where we're serious about chasing squirrels and Brains On, bark, bark, woof, bark.
SUBJECT 5: (SINGING) Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Brains On.
EVELYN: Thanks for letting me duck out for a second. Sanden is quite the facilitator.
MOLLY BLOOM: That he is. Are you ready to answer another listener question about dogs?
EVELYN: Yes.
CLAIRE: My name is Claire, and I'm from Vancouver, Canada. My question is, do dogs bark in different languages like humans do?
MOLLY BLOOM: In different countries, we definitely hear their barks differently. Like what word do we use in the United States, Evelyn, for the sound of dog makes.
EVELYN: I say bark or woof.
MOLLY BLOOM: Exactly. But if you grow up speaking Spanish, you say that the dog goes--
SUBJECT 6: Wow, wow.
MOLLY BLOOM: Or in Somali--
SUBJECT 7: Weh, weh.
MOLLY BLOOM: Or Hmong--
SUBJECT 6: Oh, whoa, whoa.
MOLLY BLOOM: Or like this.
SUBJECT 6: Gaff, guff, how, how, ho, ho, ho.
MOLLY BLOOM: That was Russian, Polish, and Chinese. But the answer to whether or not dogs actually speak different languages is no. Again, our friend Alexandra Horowitz.
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Dogs speak the same way no matter where they're from. There are no dog dialects that we know about. The only difference is how we as different language speakers refer to the sounds they're making.
MOLLY BLOOM: Dogs will learn whatever language you can teach them. But it's not like they speak English.
EVELYN: Like you could train a dog to sing whenever you say the word glarp, or roll over when you say shmugoozle.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yes, and I would love to hear that next time I go to the dog park.
EVELYN: Glarp, Gigi, glarp.
MOLLY BLOOM: Exactly. And speaking of things I want to hear, it's time to go back to that mystery sound. Let's hear it one more time.
So any new thoughts after hearing it again?
EVELYN: Not really.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, it's a tricky one for sure. Well, here is the answer.
VANESSA WOODS: So that was the sound of a toy T-rex dinosaur stomping on the floor.
EVELYN: Oh.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yes. Does that make sense?
EVELYN: I would have never gotten that.
MOLLY BLOOM: Well, the woman you just heard is Vanessa Woods. She's often surrounded by dogs at Duke University where she helps run the Duke Puppy Kindergarten.
VANESSA WOODS: We're actually using this with 16-week-old puppies to see if just like kids, if they are attracted to new things, or scared of new things, if they're brave, or a little bit shy. And understanding what the personality of a puppy is really helps us understand also how they think and what kind of problems they'll be able to solve.
Dogs are becoming this amazing research model for us because they have such a special relationship with humans. So it's very, very rare to have an animal that we can read. Like if a dog is like happy, you can tell if they're happy. If they're sad, you can tell that. And not only that, but dogs really also seem to understand us in a really special way. They understand our gestures and our body language in a way that almost no other animals do. And not only that, but in some cases, they can also read our minds.
MOLLY BLOOM: Mind reading dogs? What?
VANESSA WOODS: Say there's like a baby in front of me and I hide a toy from them under one of 2 cups, but then I point to the cup where the toy is hidden, even though the baby can't talk yet or really understand language or is just basically brand new, by the time they're about nine months old, they'll stop following my gestures because-- and it might seem really simple, but actually they know that I know that they don't know where the toy is and that I'm trying to help them. So that's what we call theory of mind, or one variation of mind reading.
And it looks like dogs also do the same thing in a really sophisticated and flexible way that we don't really see in any other animal.
MOLLY BLOOM: Vanessa puts this T-rex stomping puppy research to use by helping service dog organizations better train and choose dogs that will go on to help other people.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[KNOCKS]
SANDEN TOTTEN: Hey, Molly and Evelyn. Sorry to intrude. Look, I know you're in the middle of a taping. But we were just finishing up our dog advisory council meeting, and we're doing a quick tour, and the council really wanted to see the studio. All right, I mean, I'm sorry. They really wanted to smell the studio.
MOLLY BLOOM: Sure, sure, sure, come on in. We're almost done.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Dogs have a sense of themselves. But it probably has more to do with smell than anything else.
EVELYN: We think dogs dream in a pretty similar way to humans.
MOLLY BLOOM: Dogs don't bark differently depending on where they're from.
EVELYN: But they can learn to respond to whatever language their humans are speaking in.
MOLLY BLOOM: You can even teach a dog to read your mind.
[BARKING]
SANDEN TOTTEN: The council is very impressed with the canine representation here. They pass along their kudos.
EVELYN: Aww, thank you little cute snug machines.
[BARKING]
SANDEN TOTTEN: They prefer to be known as daring brave squirrel hunters. But they appreciate the sentiment. All right, I'm going to walk them out. No, no, I meant I'm going to like, walk out like it's time for you guys to leave. I'm not I'm not taking for a walk. I don't have time.
I've got appointments. There's other council meetings. And I mean, I'm not even wearing my walking shoes.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's it for this episode of Brains On.
EVELYN: Brains On is produced by Marc Sanchez, Sanden Totten, and Molly Bloom.
MOLLY BLOOM: We had production help from Ned Lubbock Stryker and Otis Gray. We had engineering help from Matt Porter, Johnny Vince Evans, and John Miller. Many thanks to
[LISTING HONOR ROLL]
Brains On is a nonprofit Public Radio production, and donations from listeners help us keep making new episodes. You can support the show and see our cool thank you gifts at brainson.org/donate.
EVELYN: And did you can listen to more than 100 episodes of Brains On by visiting brainson.org?
MOLLY BLOOM: It's true. We've covered everything from space, to cats, to molecules, to farts.
EVELYN: Now before we go, it's time for our Moment of Um.
PEOPLE: Um, uh, um.
JOSIE: Why does it look like the moon is following us as when we're driving in the car at night?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JANE HOUSTON JONES: Probably everybody who's ever been in a car when the moon is out has seen this and wondered why it doesn't move along with them. Hi, I'm Jane Houston Jones from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Now let's all pretend we're in a car right now and you're looking out the window. And what happens?
You see a house, maybe it's your friend's house. Then you drive a little bit further and you pass your house, maybe a little bit further you pass the school, and all those objects are moving past your view because they're really close to us.
The moon on the other hand, is really far away. It averages about 238,000 miles away from the Earth. So that's really, really far. And so as we're driving, we're not getting that much closer or farther away from the moon than we are. So it just always looks the same.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MOLLY BLOOM: This list is near and dear to my heart. It's the Brains Honor Roll. These are the incredible listeners who send their questions, ideas, mystery sounds, drawings, and high fives to us.
[LISTING HONOR ROLL]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We'll be back soon with more answers to your questions.
EVELYN: Thanks for listening.
[BARKS]
SUBJECT 1: Brains On is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
MOLLY BLOOM: Hey, Evelyn, did you have any trouble finding us?
EVELYN: Nope. The Brains On headquarters looks just like you said it would.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, it's pretty distinctive. Let's head up to the studio. Can you press that button right there?
ELEVATOR: Welcome to Brains On headquarters. Which floor?
MOLLY BLOOM: Elevator, please take us to the studio.
ELEVATOR: Holding doors for additional passengers.
[BARKS]
Of course, you're welcome.
EVELYN: Oh, what a cute dog.
MOLLY BLOOM: Is there a human coming to join this dog?
ELEVATOR: Next stop, Brains On board room.
MOLLY BLOOM: No, Elevator, I said the studio.
ELEVATOR: Yes, first stop boardroom. Second stop, studio.
EVELYN: Is the dog going to the boardroom?
ELEVATOR: Here we are. Brains On boardroom.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Hey, Molly. Hey, Evelyn. I don't remember adding you to the invite list for this meeting.
MOLLY BLOOM: What's going on in here, Sanden.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh, this is the monthly meeting of the brains on dog advisory council. I've been doing these for years.
EVELYN: I didn't know you had a brains on dog advisory council.
MOLLY BLOOM: Neither did I.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh yeah, I post about it all the time on my blog, which you guys totally read, right?
MOLLY BLOOM: Um.
[BARKS]
SANDEN TOTTEN: OK, with Archie here now joining us, the dog board is fully assembled.
[BARKS]
Oh, what's up, Penelope?
[BARKS]
Oh, don't mind the water on the floor. We had the octopus advisory council meeting in here yesterday. They have quite the sense of humor. Did they can turn off a light switch just by squirting water at it? What pranksters! Oh, speaking of which, Molly, that board, the octopus one, said they'd like to show a lot better if you had eight arms. So I told them you'd work on that.
MOLLY BLOOM: Sure.
SANDEN TOTTEN: OK. Let's get started. Take a seat, everybody. Oh, I'm sorry, I mean, sit. Good boys and girls. Stay. Good. Good. Good. Now we're going to share ideas on how to improve the show. Speak. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. One at a time. One at a time.
Molly, Evelyn, are you guys going to stay and help with this or--
MOLLY BLOOM: I kind of want to, but we have to get to the studio.
EVELYN: Yeah. Bye cutie fluffer faces.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Suit yourself. Oh, and if you see anyone from the alpaca advisory council wandering around, tell them that got pushed to Thursday. All right, bye.
ELEVATOR: Next stop, Brains On studio.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Here we have. Have a good taping.
MOLLY BLOOM: You're listening to Brains On from American Public Media. I'm Molly Bloom, and my co-host today is Evelyn from Horsham, Pennsylvania. Hi, Evelyn.
EVELYN: Hi, Molly. Thank you for having me today.
MOLLY BLOOM: Oh, thanks for being here. Now Evelyn, it is a very funny coincidence that Sanden chose today of all days to hold his dog advisory council meeting because this episode is based on a canine centric question that you sent in to us. What was that question?
EVELYN: Do dogs understand they're dogs the way a human knows it's a human.
MOLLY BLOOM: Tell us about your dogs.
EVELYN: I have a full sized goldendoodle and a mini sized goldendoodle. And the oldest one is named Titus, and then the younger one is named Pickle.
MOLLY BLOOM: So Evelyn, what made you think of this question? Do you remember?
EVELYN: I was lying in bed with my dog. And I was just thinking does he realize that he's a dog because sometimes I think he thinks he's one of us, as a human, because he lays in bed with us the way we lay in bed, he sits with us in a chair. But at the same time, he interacts with other dogs the way that they're supposed to, like they run around with each other, they play with each other, all the usual stuff.
MOLLY BLOOM: You can go to our Instagram Brains_On to see Evelyn's adorable dogs. And listeners, we'd like to see pictures of your dogs too. You can send them to us at brainson.org/contact, or post them on Instagram or Twitter and tag us. That's Brains_On. And bonus, we would love a caption telling us what you think is going through your dog's mind in that photo.
[BARKING]
Well, one step to understanding an animal state of mind is to find out if they are aware of themselves as distinct individuals in the world. It's called self-awareness. There's a famous test that's supposed to let if an animal is self aware, known as the mirror test.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It works like this. When an animal is asleep, you draw a little red mark on their face, somewhere prominent. Then when they wake up, you put them in a room with a mirror. And you wait to see if they notice.
SUBJECT 2: Hey, what's this red mark on my face?
MOLLY BLOOM: The theory is if they are self aware, they'll recognize themselves in the mirror, see the dot, and try to get it off, or at least move around to get a better look at it.
Is it a pimple? Am I going through animal puberty?
Most animals totally ignore the mirror and they never notice the dot only a few have been shown to recognize themselves in the reflection like dolphins, elephants, chimpanzees, and of course, humans. But humans can only do it after about the age of two.
SUBJECT 2: Oh, this dot won't come off. Why are all these people in lab coats staring at me? This is the last time I'm going to be a part of any study run by humans.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
EVELYN: So do dogs pass the mirror test? Are they self-aware?
MOLLY BLOOM: No, dogs do not pass this test. Sometimes dogs even think the reflection as another dog. But keep in mind it's not concrete proof of self-awareness. Dogs may still be self-aware. But this test might not be the best way to find out. Luckily, we know a scientist who spends a lot of time thinking about dogs and how they think.
EVELYN: Alexander Horowitz runs the dog cognition lab at Barnard College. Welcome, Alexandra.
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Thanks, Evelyn.
EVELYN: Do dogs understand they're dogs the way we understand we're humans?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Wow. It's such an interesting question. Do dogs understand they're dogs. Well, I think all the evidence that we have shows that they do, that they think about themselves as dogs and recognize other dogs as dogs. And this is a little surprising in some ways because dogs come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, from tiny, tiny toy chihuahuas to Great Danes and mastiffs.
But in studies, it looks like they recognize all of those types of breeds as one category of things, which is dogs. In fact, there was one study that showed dogs pictures of dog faces which all looked really different and also pictures of other animals faces like a cat and a cow and donkey. And these dogs have been trained to pick out the dog face and get a reward for it.
And then when they were shown all these faces, they had no trouble at all distinguishing who were the dogs from what were the other animals. So I think it's safe to say they know they're dogs.
EVELYN: Could dogs fail the mirror test and still be self aware?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: I love the idea of the mirror test that animals might look in the mirror like we do and notice, hey, that's me in the mirror, and especially notice if something is different about how they look. Now dogs don't pass that test. I don't know if you've ever seen a dog look in the mirror.
They're interested in the mirror. They seem to think there might be a dog there. But they don't seem to care if there's a little mark on their head, at least they don't seem to try to remove it. I thought though that this doesn't show that they don't think about themselves. I thought that maybe it was that they just don't care that much about how they look, because in fact, they are smelling creatures. They smell the world first just the way we see the world first.
So I designed a little study which I called an olfactory mirror which is just a smell test where I got a little bit of their scent, like a mirror reflection. And then I changed it a little bit. And I want to see if they were way more interested in that marked version of themself than just the regular picture of themselves. And they were. Sniffed that mark a lot longer as though they were looking in the mirror and noticing that there was something different, except for about their smell instead of about how they look.
So I think that they do have some kind of sense of themselves, but that is rooted in what they smell like, which is a little bit different than us because we might not even really what we smell like.
EVELYN: Why do dogs sometimes pick a favorite person in the family? Do you have any advice on how to become my dog's favorite person?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: [LAUGHS]
Well, I think there's no fail safe way to become a dog's favorite person, except to pay them a lot of attention. So if you think about a dog's life in a normal family, they spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen which have to do with them. That might be feeding, that has to do with them.
It might be play. If somebody is going to play with them or take them for a walk. There are lots of different ways we pay attention to our dogs. And the people who pay attention in most of those contexts, the ones who take them for the walks, the ones who notice when they're feeling rambunctious and want to play, the ones who give them their food wind up usually being the favorite person. So I'm pretty sure you can do that.
MOLLY BLOOM: And what kind of memories do dogs have? Can they remember their early lives as puppies? Can they remember how long ago you left them when you go away to work?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Well, we know that they have pretty good memories. It's not as though just because they can't talk to us about their memories they don't have memories. And we see this every day in their behavior. They recognize you even if you've been gone for a day or a week or a month, or a year. They can remember you and will recognize you pretty quickly.
But we don't know and it's hard to get evidence for how much of what we would call episodic memory that they have, in other words, memory for episodes of their life. So if they were at a shelter early in their life and it was a scary place-- and it's hard to test for episodic memories.
We can ask a person what do you remember about when you were four years old. But we can't ask an animal, a non-verbal animal that. So you have to get to it by just seeing do they recognize being in particular places, do they show familiarity with people who they've met once before. And it does look like they recognize people and places, just as we would expect. So their memory is pretty good.
EVELYN: What is the thing that people misunderstand about dogs' mind the most?
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: It's a great question. I think that most people think of dogs as just like us only smaller, furrier, maybe a little less smart. But I think in many ways they think really differently than we do, and that starts with the fact that they smell the world, where we see it.
I should say to that question, you know, that I have a theory that they can pretty much tell how long you've been gone if you're gone the same amount each day by how much less of your smell is in the house, because everybody has a smell. You know, your house has a smell. It smells like the people who live in it and the dogs who live in it. Sometimes when I go on vacation, I come back, and I open the door and I smell dogs.
And that's because there's a smell in the house, and I don't usually notice it. But our smell would diminish over the course of the day. So if you're in the next room, your dog can smell it. If you leave the room, there's still some smell of you in that room, normal smell of person. But as the day goes on, the smell would dissipate. So in some sense, the dog can tell how long you've been gone by how much of your smell has disappeared from the house. Isn't that wild?
EVELYN: That's really cool. Thank you for answering our questions.
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Yeah, my pleasure.
SUBJECT 3: Brains On.
EVELYN: Molly, speaking of dogs, do you think we can sneak back into the dog advisory council meeting? They were all so cute.
MOLLY BLOOM: We can try, but we have something else to sneak in first. It's time for the mystery sound.
SUBJECT 4: Mystery sound.
MOLLY BLOOM: Here it is.
EVELYN: I don't know. Maybe someone pouring dog food into a bowl.
MOLLY BLOOM: Very good guess. We're going to be back with the answer in just a bit.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, listeners, I have a problem. I've had the same song in my head for weeks. It's driving me a little bananas. So I'm asking for your advice. Do you have an idea for how to get this song out of my head? What works for you when you have a song stuck in your head? Or maybe you'd like to invent a creative and/or hilarious method for me to try. Whatever your ideas, please record your advice for me and send it to us at brainson.org/contact.
And while you're there, you can also send us mystery sounds, drawings, and questions, like this one.
JOSIE: Hi, my name is Josie.
BECKETT: Hi, my name is Beckett. And we're from Tahoe City, California.
JOSIE: And our question is why does it look like the moon is following us as when we're driving in the car at night?
EVELYN: We'll be back with an answer to that question during our Moment of Um at the end of the show.
MOLLY BLOOM: Plus we'll read the latest group of listeners to be added to the Brains Honor Roll.
EVELYN: So keep listening.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[BARKING]
[KNOCKS]
SANDEN TOTTEN: Who is that?
EVELYN: It's me, Evelyn. Can I come in and hang out with you guys?
SANDEN TOTTEN: Sure. We're doing some testing.
EVELYN: Oh fun.
SANDEN TOTTEN: So everybody, OK, let's see, which of these questions would make a better episode topic? Why do cats lick themselves, or do dogs dream?
[BARKING]
Wow. Unanimous vote. Dog dreams it is.
EVELYN: Wait. Dogs dream? Are they like our dreams?
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh yeah, researchers think dogs totally dream.
[BARKING]
Well, Pepper the pointer over there says dogs are expert sleepers and their sleep is a lot like ours.
[BARKING]
Interesting. Ah.
EVELYN: What? What did she say?
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh, she's a dogs typically spend about half their day sleeping, which totally jealous. But scientists think they are only dreaming for a small portion of that. Also, we tend to sleep in kind of like one long chunk overnight. But dogs they get a lot of their sleeps in little chunks, you know, like catnaps.
[BARKING]
Oh sorry, sorry, dog naps.
[BARKING]
Oh, good point, Mr. Muffin.
EVELYN: What did he say now? I really need to learn to speak dog.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Oh, just that dogs have both rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep and non rapid eye movement sleep or non REM sleep, just like us. Us non dog people, we've been known to dream during both phases of sleep. But the dreams we typically remember, like the weird ones where your best friend shows up but they're also a bee, and they sting you. And you swell up and explode. But it's OK because it turns out you were really a pinata this whole time, and now there's candy and everyone gets candy. You know, those kind of dreams? Those are mostly associated with REM sleep.
EVELYN: Oh, interesting. Weird but interesting.
SANDEN TOTTEN: Yeah, dogs enter REM sleep about 20 minutes into a snooze. And that's when you might see their breathing change a little or their legs twitch. And that's a sign they're dreaming. In fact, there's a part of the brain called the pons that seems to keep humans and dogs from acting out their dreams when they sleep. Some studies have found that when that area is not working in dogs, they actually get up and do the stuff in their dreams, like they act it out.
EVELYN: Like what?
SANDEN TOTTEN: Well, a pointer dog might get up and point at dream birds, or a terrier might dig for dream rabbits in a dream warren.
[BARKING]
Oh, French Fry over there says she dreams about owning a small bed and breakfast in wine country where the dogs and people can go and sign up for spa treatments.
[BARKING]
Oh, I'm sorry. I misheard. She dreams about eating garbage. It sounds a lot like owning a bed and breakfast. It's easy to confuse the two.
[SQUEAKY TOY]
Time for our break. All right, everybody, take five. There are bowls of water on the table in the back and a fire hydrant outside if you need to use the restroom. We'll meet back here to review new taglines for the show. Right now the top contenders are-- let's see. Brains On where we're serious about chasing squirrels and Brains On, bark, bark, woof, bark.
SUBJECT 5: (SINGING) Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Brains On.
EVELYN: Thanks for letting me duck out for a second. Sanden is quite the facilitator.
MOLLY BLOOM: That he is. Are you ready to answer another listener question about dogs?
EVELYN: Yes.
CLAIRE: My name is Claire, and I'm from Vancouver, Canada. My question is, do dogs bark in different languages like humans do?
MOLLY BLOOM: In different countries, we definitely hear their barks differently. Like what word do we use in the United States, Evelyn, for the sound of dog makes.
EVELYN: I say bark or woof.
MOLLY BLOOM: Exactly. But if you grow up speaking Spanish, you say that the dog goes--
SUBJECT 6: Wow, wow.
MOLLY BLOOM: Or in Somali--
SUBJECT 7: Weh, weh.
MOLLY BLOOM: Or Hmong--
SUBJECT 6: Oh, whoa, whoa.
MOLLY BLOOM: Or like this.
SUBJECT 6: Gaff, guff, how, how, ho, ho, ho.
MOLLY BLOOM: That was Russian, Polish, and Chinese. But the answer to whether or not dogs actually speak different languages is no. Again, our friend Alexandra Horowitz.
ALEXANDER HOROWITZ: Dogs speak the same way no matter where they're from. There are no dog dialects that we know about. The only difference is how we as different language speakers refer to the sounds they're making.
MOLLY BLOOM: Dogs will learn whatever language you can teach them. But it's not like they speak English.
EVELYN: Like you could train a dog to sing whenever you say the word glarp, or roll over when you say shmugoozle.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yes, and I would love to hear that next time I go to the dog park.
EVELYN: Glarp, Gigi, glarp.
MOLLY BLOOM: Exactly. And speaking of things I want to hear, it's time to go back to that mystery sound. Let's hear it one more time.
So any new thoughts after hearing it again?
EVELYN: Not really.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, it's a tricky one for sure. Well, here is the answer.
VANESSA WOODS: So that was the sound of a toy T-rex dinosaur stomping on the floor.
EVELYN: Oh.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yes. Does that make sense?
EVELYN: I would have never gotten that.
MOLLY BLOOM: Well, the woman you just heard is Vanessa Woods. She's often surrounded by dogs at Duke University where she helps run the Duke Puppy Kindergarten.
VANESSA WOODS: We're actually using this with 16-week-old puppies to see if just like kids, if they are attracted to new things, or scared of new things, if they're brave, or a little bit shy. And understanding what the personality of a puppy is really helps us understand also how they think and what kind of problems they'll be able to solve.
Dogs are becoming this amazing research model for us because they have such a special relationship with humans. So it's very, very rare to have an animal that we can read. Like if a dog is like happy, you can tell if they're happy. If they're sad, you can tell that. And not only that, but dogs really also seem to understand us in a really special way. They understand our gestures and our body language in a way that almost no other animals do. And not only that, but in some cases, they can also read our minds.
MOLLY BLOOM: Mind reading dogs? What?
VANESSA WOODS: Say there's like a baby in front of me and I hide a toy from them under one of 2 cups, but then I point to the cup where the toy is hidden, even though the baby can't talk yet or really understand language or is just basically brand new, by the time they're about nine months old, they'll stop following my gestures because-- and it might seem really simple, but actually they know that I know that they don't know where the toy is and that I'm trying to help them. So that's what we call theory of mind, or one variation of mind reading.
And it looks like dogs also do the same thing in a really sophisticated and flexible way that we don't really see in any other animal.
MOLLY BLOOM: Vanessa puts this T-rex stomping puppy research to use by helping service dog organizations better train and choose dogs that will go on to help other people.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[KNOCKS]
SANDEN TOTTEN: Hey, Molly and Evelyn. Sorry to intrude. Look, I know you're in the middle of a taping. But we were just finishing up our dog advisory council meeting, and we're doing a quick tour, and the council really wanted to see the studio. All right, I mean, I'm sorry. They really wanted to smell the studio.
MOLLY BLOOM: Sure, sure, sure, come on in. We're almost done.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Dogs have a sense of themselves. But it probably has more to do with smell than anything else.
EVELYN: We think dogs dream in a pretty similar way to humans.
MOLLY BLOOM: Dogs don't bark differently depending on where they're from.
EVELYN: But they can learn to respond to whatever language their humans are speaking in.
MOLLY BLOOM: You can even teach a dog to read your mind.
[BARKING]
SANDEN TOTTEN: The council is very impressed with the canine representation here. They pass along their kudos.
EVELYN: Aww, thank you little cute snug machines.
[BARKING]
SANDEN TOTTEN: They prefer to be known as daring brave squirrel hunters. But they appreciate the sentiment. All right, I'm going to walk them out. No, no, I meant I'm going to like, walk out like it's time for you guys to leave. I'm not I'm not taking for a walk. I don't have time.
I've got appointments. There's other council meetings. And I mean, I'm not even wearing my walking shoes.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's it for this episode of Brains On.
EVELYN: Brains On is produced by Marc Sanchez, Sanden Totten, and Molly Bloom.
MOLLY BLOOM: We had production help from Ned Lubbock Stryker and Otis Gray. We had engineering help from Matt Porter, Johnny Vince Evans, and John Miller. Many thanks to
[LISTING HONOR ROLL]
Brains On is a nonprofit Public Radio production, and donations from listeners help us keep making new episodes. You can support the show and see our cool thank you gifts at brainson.org/donate.
EVELYN: And did you can listen to more than 100 episodes of Brains On by visiting brainson.org?
MOLLY BLOOM: It's true. We've covered everything from space, to cats, to molecules, to farts.
EVELYN: Now before we go, it's time for our Moment of Um.
PEOPLE: Um, uh, um.
JOSIE: Why does it look like the moon is following us as when we're driving in the car at night?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JANE HOUSTON JONES: Probably everybody who's ever been in a car when the moon is out has seen this and wondered why it doesn't move along with them. Hi, I'm Jane Houston Jones from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Now let's all pretend we're in a car right now and you're looking out the window. And what happens?
You see a house, maybe it's your friend's house. Then you drive a little bit further and you pass your house, maybe a little bit further you pass the school, and all those objects are moving past your view because they're really close to us.
The moon on the other hand, is really far away. It averages about 238,000 miles away from the Earth. So that's really, really far. And so as we're driving, we're not getting that much closer or farther away from the moon than we are. So it just always looks the same.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MOLLY BLOOM: This list is near and dear to my heart. It's the Brains Honor Roll. These are the incredible listeners who send their questions, ideas, mystery sounds, drawings, and high fives to us.
[LISTING HONOR ROLL]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We'll be back soon with more answers to your questions.
EVELYN: Thanks for listening.
[BARKS]
Transcription services provided by 3Play Media.
