How the Dog's Mind Works and what Neuroscientists are Learning About Dog's Brains.

How the Dog's mind works

Dogs may be better too than 3-to-4-year-old children at learning to ignore bad instructions. In a Yale study reported in the APS journal, dogs and small children were given a box and taught to turn a lever to open the lid and get a treat. 
When the lever was rigged so that it was no longer needed, the dogs learned to ignore it and simply open the box. The children continued to turn the useless thing all the same. While the sizes of the two brains differ, the structures are strikingly similar. Over the past several years, Neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his team have used that similarity to good effect. Much of their MRI work has focused on the part of the brain known as the striatum. Rich in dopamine, the striatum mediates reward, pleasure, and expectation--three pillars of a dog's world.The brain imaging showed dogs processed words using the left side of their brains, just as humans do. They use the right side of their brain understand tone and pitch.  Researchers at Emory University wanted to see what was happening in the brain of awake, unrestrained dogs -- something that had not been done before. They trained dogs to walk into and sit in an MRI machine. The dogs were also taught using hand signals -- one signal meant they would receive a treat and the other meant they would not. When the dogs saw the signal for a treat the region of the brain associated with rewards in humans lit up with activity. The researchers concluded that the brain scan showed something most pet guardians would say they already knew. Dogs pay close attention to signals from humans, and these signals work closely with the brain's reward system.  The brain structures that cause emotions in dogs resemble the analogous structures in humans. Dogs also have the same brain waves as humans when they are sleeping and are thought to dream, just as we do. that dogs felt empathy for not only their human guardians when they cried but also for human strangers the conclusion that dogs also understand when they are being treated unfairly.the brain accounts for approximately 2% of total body mass (Dogs fall in between, with brains at about 1.2% of the average dog's body mass). Encephalization quotient is one way to measure how big an animal's brain is compared with its expected size based on the species' body massDogs’ brains are smaller than ours when compared to overall body size. Our brains have more folds, meaning more surface area. And our prefrontal cortex—where higher level processing and thoughts occur—is more developed than dogs’  their is a story about (America Emory University Atlanta) in laboratory 3 years Yong pit bull breed female ninja sitting quietly on a table near an MRI machine. Ninja is one of the world famous Dogs who during the MRI learned how to sit quietly without procrastinating so that Neuroscientist Gregory Bern's can see how minds work of the dog name pit bull ninja.Like humans, older dogs have a propensity to develop a condition that is similar to Alzheimer's disease. Because of the semblances between their brains and ours, dogs are used to evaluate the impact of nutrition and drugs on the brain’s aging process.