“Interestingly, when you look at the entire literature on animal-assisted therapy, patterns begin to emerge. Of the different animals used in therapy, dogs are the ones associated with the largest beneficial effects on health. And although positive effects were observed… — Gregory Berns Copy Share Image
“In answer to the question “What are dogs thinking?” the grand conclusion was this: they’re thinking about what we’re thinking.” — Gregory Berns Copy Share Image
“Interpreting dog behavior through the lens of wolf behavior is even worse than anthropomorphizing: it’s a human anthropomorphizing wolf behavior and using that flawed impression as an analogy for dog behavior. Wolf analogies have led to many flawed training strategies based on the idea that the human must be the “pack leader,” an approach most commonly associated with Cesar Millan.… — Gregory Berns Copy Share
“Skinner box, a device that automatically trains rats or pigeons to learn behaviors.” — Gregory Berns Copy Share Image
“Lorenz, however, believed that the ideal canine companion was a “resonance dog.” He noted the extraordinary parallelism in personality between many dogs and their… — Gregory Berns Copy Share Image
“stress is lowest in the morning and rises steadily throughout the day. But the presence of dogs kept self-reported stress at their morning levels… — Gregory Berns Copy Share Image
“The defining trait of dogs, therefore, is their interspecies social intelligence, an ability to intuit what humans and other animals are thinking. Wolves do… — Gregory Berns Copy Share Image
“Do dogs have some concept of humans as something more than food dispensers? Simply knowing that human feelings toward dogs are reciprocated in some… — Gregory Berns Copy Share Image
“We love dogs, but what do they think of us? Even with just two dogs, a picture was beginning to emerge. The pattern of activations in the cortex suggested that they concocted mental models of our behavior, which might be due to mirror neuron activity. But regardless of the mechanism, the smell data showed that their mental models included the… — Gregory Berns Copy Share
“organ (VNO), thought to be specialized for detecting scents from other dogs and therefore to function in some capacity for social signaling” — Gregory Berns Copy Share Image
