Dog and human brains are more alike than you might think

If you are from the “dogmen” class, you may have noticed that these animals often seem to understand how we feel when we talk to them, right? For, according to the Scietific American, a detailed evaluation of the dog brain pointed out that this communication with your pet is probably not just an impression of you.

Countless behavioral studies have already been done to find out if this link between animals and humans really exists and to what extent it occurs. However, while dogs are shown to be able to understand more than 100 human words, it was difficult to determine if they could also understand the emotional meaning conveyed through the tone of our voices.

According to Scientific American, a team led by Attila Andics from the University of Budapest, Hungary, seems to have an answer to this question. Andics decided to perform a comparative neurological analysis between humans and dogs. The animals underwent CT scans in which - after undergoing extensive training - they remained completely still while listening to 200 individual sounds.

Animal Sound x Human Sound

Noises reproduced during the experiments included ambient noises, whistles, barks and growls from other dogs, as well as human sounds, for example, used to stimulate the auditory cortex, that is, the brain region of these animals responsible for identifying acoustic information. Similarly, a group of humans also underwent CT scans while listening to exactly the same noises.

During the experiments, the researchers observed that when they hear people's voices, a region of the brain called the temporal pole becomes active in both humans and dogs. Scientists believe this brain area is responsible for processing sounds and generating emotional responses, and was thought to be unique to humans. However, for the first time, it has been shown that the temporal pole is active in dogs as well.

Another finding was that sounds such as crying or laughing also awaken the same brain region - near the primary temporal pole - of dogs and humans alike, and that dogs are more attentive to environmental noise, while the same sounds elicit far less pronounced responses in humans.

The analysis also revealed that both dogs and humans exhibit greater neural activity when they hear voices that reflect positive emotions - such as laughter, for example - than negative, and both groups respond better when they hear noise from individuals of their own species.

Evolutionary Inheritance

The result of the experiments suggests that brain areas related to voice processing and interpretation with respect to evolutionary origin may be older than previously thought. Thus, it is possible that both humans and dogs - which were domesticated 18, 000 to 32, 000 years ago - are evolving in parallel, which is why dogs are able to process the emotions present in human vocalizations.

What's more, as the researchers explained, because the brain areas observed in the study are much older than the domestication of dogs, this means they may have originated in a common ancestor of the two species, a carnivorous mammal with a brain. the size of an egg that existed 100 million years ago. So when you talk to your pet and he seems to understand you, he probably is!