What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience

by Gregory Berns

"Dog lovers and neuroscientists should both read this important book." -- Dr. Temple Grandin What is it like to be a dog? A bat? Or a dolphin? To find out, neuroscientist and bestselling author Gregory Berns and his team did something nobody had ever they trained dogs to go into an MRI scanner -- completely awake -- so they could figure out what they think and feel. And dogs were just the beginning. In What It's Like to Be a Dog, Berns takes us into the minds of wild sea lions who can learn to dance, dolphins who can see with sound, and even the now extinct Tasmanian tiger. Berns's latest scientific breakthroughs prove definitively that animals have feelings very much like we do -- a revelation that forces us to reconsider how we think about and treat animals. Written with insight, empathy, and humor, What It's Like to Be a Dog is the new manifesto for animal liberation of the twenty-first century.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Dogs, Animals, Neuroscience, Audiobook, Psychology

321 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 5, 2017

About the author

Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University and Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.

* Ph.D. University of California, Davis, 1990
* M.D. University of California, San Diego, 1994

Reviews

[Diana · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has an easy way to explain things, and it takes you in a comprehensive route through neurocience and the brain and different theories and opinions and facts, which may help you in grounding yourself and giving you a sense of back story knowledge. They also tell you how they did prepare some dogs and trained them to go into the MRI machine and get some results.
What I find "ironic" is that I am 50% into the book and still awaiting to know what it is like to be a dog, because we have had some snippets about it, but the book has been way off the mark of the tittle and more centered on the subtittle: so far, lots of neurocience and brain talk, sea lions and dolphins. But... where are the dogs?
Also, around 70% of the book there was some talk abkut how dogs processed words, and it seemed like after getting the results of the experiment, the author was projecting his thoughts on the matter as sciencitic evidence too.
At this point and seeing that chapter 9 again deviates from dogs and goes to the tasmanian devil I've decided to stop reading. As I've said, the author's style is fluent, offers a lot of background but, consifering the cover and main tittle, I was expecting this to be mainly about dogs, which isn't.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covers different approaches and findings in recent animal brain research. Those who buy this book to learn about dogs will be disappointed.

A lot of space, for the size of the book, is devoted to brain evolution (I learned that jellyfish have neural nets that serve as brains); how sea lions can be trained to dance and the history of and search for the thylacine. The author writes well for the lay audience. He keeps the technical jargon down and uses easy to grasp analogies.

The experiments had long anecdotal introductions. For some the results are generally unsatisfying (no fault of the author) but the process and possibilities are provocative. For some, more clarity is needed. For instance:

-how did they know the dog recognized a non-object noun vocabulary word?
-or how did they know the dogs understood the facial expressions?
- did the author actually use the MRI he built in his home; the photos don’t look like the homemade MRI he described or that they were taken in a residence.
-Is building an MRI a viable project for the general public?

(In this section I learned that the MRI banging comes from the body and not the equipment. Is this generally known?)

There are photos of several brains and a discussion of what they can tell about the animal.

I liked the chapter at the end that summarizes the legal, ethical and community issues of animal research, not just for medical advances but for pure science.

I picked this up because I wanted to know what it is like to be a dog; but that will have to wait. Presuming this is the state of what is known (and the author seems to be on top of it) research has a long way to go.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Berns uses what he’s learned about human cognition and emotion in the title of this book, which promises insights into the understanding of the dog brain. To be fair, the book does discuss experiments and findings involving what happens in a dog’s brain while commands are given and associations are made. But the book goes far beyond the dog to discuss cognition and sentience in animals of many kinds, principally by using evidence from MRI and fMRI brain scans. It is a fascinating look at the study of neuroscience on animals.

Despite the density of terms required to study neuroscience, Berns guides us easily through the basics, allowing us to understand the principal goal of their studies on dogs: to determine how dogs process information. I will admit to a degree of awe to think they could manage to get a dog to voluntarily crouch within a noisy MRI machine and stay immoveable long enough to be scanned while the scientists perform tests. Georgia dog trainer Mark Spivak was given a shout-out at the end of this book for his insights and indefatigable efforts to this end.

The decades-long work of Peter Cook of the pinniped labs in Santa Cruz, CA is highlighted for several chapters beginning with “Seizing Sea Lions.” Berns and Cook worked together to determine the effects of domoic acid toxicity on normal patterns of connectivity in the brains of dead sea lions. Domoic toxicity caused by agricultural runoff was determined to be the cause of a wave of malnourished sea lion strandings during El Niño years.

After the sea lions come dolphins, a discussion of how echolocation manifests in the brain, and some indication how dolphin brains resemble and differ from other mammals. Then back to dogs, where studies have shown a real possibility that rats and dogs may experience regret: regret for choices that do not turn out as desirable as anticipated. Berns acknowledges it is difficult to imagine regret in a rat, but he suggests that our word for it does not limit the experience of the emotion to those who understand the word. From here he moves from “what do words mean to animals”?

The detail in his discussion of dog training with words and visual cues may lead other scientists to suggest tweaks that may lead to even greater understanding of the emotional responses of animals. Enough work has been done now on a variety of mammals (and even crows!) to show emotions are a part of their brain activity and daily life. But what appeared to be almost a failure of dogs to recognize words led to a new insight:

“It may be that in a dog’s semantic space, actions and things are very close, which would explain why it was so difficult to teach the dogs the names of things. The semantic representation for ‘squirrel’ might be to ‘chase and kill,’ while ‘ball’ becomes ‘chase and retrieve.’…Human represent the world with nouns…it might require a shift in perspective—in this case, from a noun-based worldview to one based in action…In an action-based worldview, everything would be transactional.”

In one of the final chapters, called “A Death in Tasmania,” Berns tries something completely different. He writes of his experience traveling to Australia to view the habitat and scan the brain of an Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial mammal species thought to be extinct. As an experience and as a piece of research, it is as different from his earlier work as studying the brains of placental mammals and marsupial mammals, two animals who evolved differently over millennia. Berns uses narrative nonfiction techniques to situate us visually, historically, physically in “one of the last great wildernesses on Earth…utterly unique and worthy of protection.”

The chapter on Tasmania really highlighted Berns’ special skills as a scientist—his ability to look beyond the lab to the wider meanings of neuroscience “for the rest of us,” as he emphasized in his final chapter on the “Dog Lab.” Working for so long on understanding the extent of animal cognition, consciousness, sentience, or self-awareness has led him to animal advocacy, if only for our own selfish reasons. “We, Homo sapiens, might soon be an animal in the eyes of our successors…” given our tinkering and experimentation with the human genome. One day unmodified humans may be considered undesirable, inferior.

Berns has skill in involving us, allowing us to follow his work. He would like to map the brains of the Earth’s megafauna with the best science and equipment available today.

“The WWF estimates that two-thirds of many species’ populations maybe gone by 2020. [Is 2020 a misprint?] Apart from the ecological catastrophe, scientific opportunities may be lost forever. It is imperative that we begin the archival process for all species, and especially for megafauna…”

[Ned Frederick · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title of this book should be, What It's like to be a Neuroscientist. There is precious little new information about the nature of dog consciousness. A lot of interesting questions, and a ton of information about the puzzle and how neuroscientists are trying to solve. After wading through all that, the reader is left with maybe a dozen pages of minor revelations about what it's like to be a dog. Not what I signed up for.

[Aoife · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Neuroscientist Gregory Burns put his love for dogs, and his questions about their behaviour to work when he decided to embark on a project examining the brains of dogs under an MRI scanner to see what he could find out about how it all worked in comparison to the brains of humans.

This book looks at the driving forces behind the actions of dogs, whether it be food, love of an owner or a combination of both, as well as taking turns at looking at other animals in the natural world from sea lions, dolphins and Tasmanian Devils. Burns even gets to handle a 100-year-old brain of a creature thought to have gone extinct in the 1900s.

As a dog lover and an animal/nature lover I really enjoyed this book and I found the topic really interesting. Thanks to a glance at other reviews before I picked the book up, I knew not to expect the book to be all about dogs, though the start and end are both focused on the author's work with dogs. I think it's very unfair to review this book poorly because of the 'lack' of dogs in it - as dogs are the author's love and interest in dogs is the driving force behind the project before he begins to explore other animals. I think the book is really well written and engaging - I particularly loved learning more about sea lions, and how clever they are and the training methods used to see how they used their brains - as well as the domoic acid poisoning which I had never heard of before.

I also loved learning more about the thylacine which, while a very sad story maintains a small bit of hope that perhaps there are more out there, just hiding away from the humans who persecuted them for years.

CW at the end of this book for mentions of animal cruelty and animals being harmed for the 'benefits' of science/science experimentation. I really appreciate and respect Gregory Burns for telling the story that clearly haunts him, from when he was in medical school and as part of lab work, had to experiment different drugs on dogs before killing them. You can feel the shame, pain and regret from the author and even though the story was hard to read, I respected him for sharing it and not hiding away from the continuous cruelty of animals within the world of science. And I really loved and appreciated how he shared how they gave the dogs within the MRI training a choice on if they wanted to go into the scanner, and there were some who despite training wouldn't do it and didn't have to.

All in all, an enjoyable nature-focused non fiction that I really liked reading!

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What It's Like to be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience" is a quite interesting and fascinating book written by neuroscientist Gregory Berns who uses fMRI to scan the brains of animals. He does this in order to learn what it's like to be a dog or a sea lion, a dolphin or a Tasmanian devil, and other mammals. Comparing their brains to those of humans, he has been able to map specific brain regions that are common in all mammals, in order to help us understand more about the inner life of various animals.
At times I found the details about the specificities of the scans a bit tedious but overall found the book very interesting. I was pleased to see that Berns' dog subjects are all voluntary; the dogs themselves are given the choice whether or not they want to participate. The brains of most other subjects are from deceased individuals, and his tests are very humane, unlike many other testing done on non-human animals.
This is an important and timely book, as more people are becoming aware of the plight of animals, and realise they should be treated humanely and with compassion. When we realise they too are sentient beings, as we can see from the MRIs, other studies and simple observation, we are more likely to treat them humanely. I should point out that Berns' personal feelings about animal advocacy and rights are contained to just the last chapter of the book, so readers who are concerned they might feel preached at need not worry. This is a book to inform, above all else, what it might be like to be these animals, not to push any certain agenda. There are many other books on that topic for those of us interested, but those who are not should still enjoy "What It's like to be a Dog".
Dog lovers will want to read this book, as will anyone who wants to learn more about the brains and inner lives of other mammals.

[Literary Redhead · Rating 5 out of 5]

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A DOG is a totally delightful and fascinating book by Gregory Berns, Emory University Professor of Psychology, and a guy who loves his dog Callie so much that it led to this research.

Named one of the "TEN BEST SCIENCE BOOKS OF 2017" by Smithsonian, Berns’ book shares his groundbreaking research using MRI brain scanning to determine how dogs think, feel, use language, and take in their world. He learned that dogs’ emotions are similar to ours, as he trained canines to lie still ... voluntarily ... in MRI machines while he scanned to explore their brain function.

In an interview with Marc Bekoff for Psychology Today, Berns said, “What started with two dogs grew to almost 100, and we began discovering things about how dogs’ minds work. So, much of my new book is about what we discovered. And not just about dogs — about other animals, too.”

Berns and his team went on to scan the brains of autopsied dolphins, sea lions, raccoons and even an extinct Tasmanian tiger to extend his understanding of animal neuroscience.

He explained, "The overarching theme is that we see startling similarities in how animals’ brains function. This means that all animals — whether dog or human — have many neural processes in common. So when we see the same part of a dog’s brain active as a human’s under similar conditions, the implication is that the dog is experiencing something very similar to us. Also, just like humans, we see tremendous variation in these responses from one dog to another. This means that dogs, like humans, are individuals. We are quickly moving beyond the question of “what it’s like to be a dog” to “what it’s like to be that dog.”
  
As Bekoff concludes after his discussion with Berns, "All in all, based on neuroimaging and other research, we can now learn what each individual animal wants and needs to have the best life possible in a human-centered world, and what we must do to make sure they do."

What It's Like to Be a Dog is highly recommended for those who love animals, are interested in neuroscience or just want an absorbing read. 5/5

Pub Date 02 Oct 2018

Thanks to Perseus Books, Basic Books and NetGalley for the review copy. Opinions are fully mine.

#WhatIt'sLikeToBeAdog #NetGalley

[RavensScar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a ARC of this book through Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.

Fascinating. That's the first word that comes to my mind after finishing this book. We still need to learn so much about the animals and other fellow beings we share this planet with.

This book lets the read peek at how science is trying to understand our fellow beings.

I myself have dogs and cats. And I often wonder about what they're thinking. Why they behave the way they do. The book gives a brief glimps at how the science world is trying to explain these and other questions. I think we all will look at our pets and other animals differently in the future thanks to research such as the author is describing.

FYI the book is not just about dogs.

I liked it and I will probably read it again.

[Linden · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle should be the main title, as this book deals with neuroscience, and not just dogs; a variety of other creatures, including sea mammals and Tasmanian devils, are mentioned. These are all interesting topics, but as a dog person, I probably would not have even given a book about animal brain study a second glance.

[Margot Rizzi]

Cool!

[Letitia Moffitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and mostly accessible to the lay-person, this book really made me think about animals differently. The research Berns describes here focuses on neuroscience, specifically scanning brains with MRI, and he's not interested so much in what human activities animals are able to do (language, music, etc.) so much as how the animals experience doing these things. This is eye-opening because so much of the time animals researchers seem determined to prove that certain animals are "as intelligent" as humans -- as though equal intellectual ability is the only thing determining a species's worth. Intelligence, however, is relatively easy to measure; sentience is not. Some of the most interesting aspects of this book lie in how researchers came up with ways to measure things that might seem unmeasurable -- for example, how do you discover whether an animal feels regret? (The answer described here is fairly ingenious.)

The last three chapters weren't as interesting to me and seemed digressive; two chapters on the thylacine felt thin, and the final chapter, which throws support for animals rights, didn't feel as strongly or clearly argued as it might have been. That said, this was both entertaining and enlightening as a whole, so I give it 4.5 stars.

[Wade · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of the book is more scientific than I really care for, but the author does a good job making it easy for common people to understand. There was less about dogs than I expected.

I really enjoyed the last two chapters about thylacines and animal rights. It felt like I was reading a different book compared to the earlier chapters.

[Aimee Dars · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the mission to kill Osama bin Laden was made public, neuroscientist Gregory Berns thought about Cairo, the dog who rappelled with his handler from a helicopter into the desert compound in Pakistan. If a dog could be trained in that context, surely Berns could train dogs to enter an MRI machine for a scan. The Dog Project was born. Starting with his dog Callie and using a mock MRI tube and coils, he began training dogs. The dogs were not sedated or restrained and were given the respect according to human subjects--the right to refuse, which some did.

Working with Peter Cook and other colleagues, Berns developed innovative and well-designed studies that revealed aspects of the dog's brain structure and provided insight into their mental processes. Investigating self-control, preferences, and even emotion recognition, over and over, Berns discovered that humans and dogs shared the same brain structures and that they functioned in the same way. Berns' interest in dog neuroscience extended to other animals as well. He scanned the brains of sea lions, dolphins, and Tasmanian devils and the extinct Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine). The results Berns shares here provide insight not just into dog neurology, consciousness, and behavior, but into other animals as well, including human animals. We are much more similar than different, and, as Berns anticipated, the "inevitable" result of the studies is a necessary questioning of how we use and abuse animals and their habitats.

I loved What It's Like to Be a Dog, thought I have to admit that this book appeals to my interests as a dog guardian, animal lover, and animal rights supporter. Even if you do not fall into all or even one of these categories, the book is worth reading. While I thought this might be a rather light-hearted summary of Bern's research, I was proven wrong. I learned so much about brain structure and function across species. Though the concepts are complicated, Berns writes in an engaging and straightforward manner that make the scientific descriptions easy to follow. Berns summarizes his own research which is innovative and well-designed, and the book itself is well-researched, drawing on the most recent studies. While Berns is excellent recounting the science, he is at his best when describing the dogs who participated in the research. His love for them is clear, and there's nothing I love more than someone who loves dogs.

Berns' concludes that research has not yet show that animals are self-aware, but there is no question they are sentient, and he criticizes how we approach animals as property. His analysis only supports my personal beliefs, but this may be controversial for some readers who have a utilitarian approach to the use of animals in research and food production. Although this is definitely a science book, it is completely relatable, and more than once, I was brought to tears. A description of the last Tasmanian Tiger's final days in an Australian zoo absolutely gutted me, and I had to skip a few paragraph when Berns recounts his experience at his medical school's dog lab.

The book is illustrated with photographs of the MRI dogs in action as well as some of the brain scans, the former adorable and the latter intriguing. I did wish that there had been an diagram showing the regions of the brain since Berns often referred to different areas. With the title and cover image, I was primed for a book on dogs, so I was surprised to read about sea lions and marsupials, but I welcomed the perspective these studies provided.

Whether you love dogs, enjoy reading about cutting-edge science, or are an animal rights advocate, you should read What It's Like to Be a Dog. You will learn as much about your own brain as about those of our animal relatives.

Thank you to Netgalley and Basic Books for providing an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Taveri · Rating 5 out of 5]

One thing  that stood out was the dogs were not harmed in the research, which was a contrast to "Democracy in Honey Bees" where sometimes whole colonies were devastated.  That made me cringe.  The last chapter was about the ethical treatment of animals and some of the progress that has been made.

The book wasn't so much about dogs as neuroscience of animals brains hence the subtitle "and other Adventures in Neuroscience"  Perhaps the publisher thought having dogs in the title would make the book more marketable.

It was well written and a smooth read.  I learned about how parts of the brain correlated with learning and how dolphins (mammals) are different (with echolocation) but similar to bats despite 80 million years of separation.  I don't buy into the convergent evolution labeling but it is interesting that the systems and genes are so similar.  They both have larger inferior colliculi.

There was also a review on delayed gratification testing and forty years later, where kids who had better ability to delay gratification to having a more responsive inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).  This paralled what was found in dogs.  Then the author outlines the challenges to designing a similar experiment for animals.

Studies on animal brains showed a correlation of weight of brain to ~weight of body raised to the exponent 2/3.

Other interesting mentions: insects have about the same number of muscles as we do; species that store their food have larger hippocampi (for spatial memory) than those that do not; white matter volume was equal to gray matter raised to the power 1.23, relationship explained by a simple principle in which the brain minimized long distance connections; and connectomics (brain connections provides a roadmap) held the possibility to get inside the animal mind.  

It was appreciated that the author recognized that animal mental representations are different than ours.  Whereas we focus on nouns representing the whole a dog might be reference texture.  Humans generalize to shapes but dogs studied generalized initially on size and then later on texture but never on shape.

Clusters were identified in the brain where actions were associated in one place, while words associated with quatity in another, and words associated with social concepts in yet another.  Where we might associate "hedgehog" with an object dogs might associate the word with fetch.  I had always wondered if the vervet monkey warnings for eagle and leopard were actually "danger from above" and "danger from below".

Many animals can distinguish faces: crows can do it; cows can discriminate between pictures of other cows; elephants and dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors.  It is not clear if cats can recognize faces; maybe they don't care.

Unfortunately thylacines (Tasmanian tigers) were not studied before they perished (possibly account killings of sheep being wrongly attributed to them the author demostrates).  The author used nueroscience analysis of a rare hundred year old pickled thylacine brain to find out which brain parts were elaborated to show they were not inclined to hunt down prey.  The analysis was validated through leg structures being different from coyotes, where the thylacine's elbow joints didn't have the biochemical structure for pursuit; instead they were suited to ambushing prey.

Furthermore their teeth were suited to puncturing and not the tearing and slashing evidence found in the slaughtered sheep.

By virtue of larger prefontal cortex (revealed in the MRI scan) it was deduced the thylacine had a more complex life than its closest living relative, the Tasmanian devil.  Based on the size of the frontal cortex and its connections to other parts of the brain, the author was convinced the thylacine was an itelligent emotional creature but couldn't go so far as to say whether it was sentient (self aware) or not.

The author mentions are extinct (giant) marsupials such as the Diprotodont, a hippo sized wombat; and Thylacoleo carnifex (marsupial lion).  The latter had the largest bite strength per body size of any mammal.

[Mary Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review!

Format: eBook from NetGalley

In this book, Berns recounts his process and findings in his research on animal neuroscience. While he does spend a fair amount of time on dogs, he also discusses sea lions, Tasmanian tigers, dolphins, and more. Berns moves between personal anecdotes, his own experiences as a researcher, and providing accessible descriptions of his findings, which gives a well-rounded picture of his research.

I will admit that I picked up this book mostly for the adventures in animal neuroscience about dogs, but I was really pleasantly surprised about how interested I was in even the sections about animals that I only very rarely think of, like sea lions and Tasmanian tigers. I definitely have a personal investment in learning about how dogs experience the world and not nearly as much emotional stake in other animals that he discusses. But over all, I found that his discussion of other animals really enhanced and expanded the topics that he introduced using dogs and ultimately all of the animals that he discussed really complement each other.

When it comes to nonfiction books, I am always hesitant to really dive in because you never know how the author is going to approach the book. Sometimes, science writers will assume that you have some knowledge about the topic when you pick up the book and some approach from a more introductory starting point. In this case, I really needed Berns to go back to the basics and explain even very basic and fundamental concepts in the field of neuroscience. And I needed him to explain them in a very accessible way because I am about as far from a neuroscientist as someone can be. I found that this book really fulfilled that need. He really went back to basics and went out of his way to describe everything he researches in the most accessible possible terms. I really appreciate how he managed to reduce really very complicated ideas to bite-size descriptions that allowed me to understand the point he was trying to make.

And ultimately, I think that he makes really interesting and important points. Yes, the research is interesting and it was fascinating to get a look into the field of animal neuroscience, especially with such a focus on dogs. But really he is writing this book in order to advocate for the importance of the field as a whole. He is trying to convey to his audience how much can be learned from animal neuroscience and how much knowledge will be lost if we fail to pursue this research, as happened with the Tasmanian tiger. We will lose links in the evolutionary chain and we will ultimately be losing, bit by bit, the potential to fully understand how we (and the dogs we love) came to be.

I liked this book a lot and I think that I learned a lot from it. It is presented in an interesting and accessible way. My only criticism is that it is long and I think that this book could have accomplished everything that it accomplished with significantly fewer pages. There were a few long, repetitive sections that could have been trimmed. But, ultimately, that is not a big deal to me. I think that the style, content, and pacing of this book was really well done and I am pretty confident that I am walking away from this book understanding exactly what Berns wanted readers to understand. I gave this book a 4 out of 5 stars.

Note: some of my reviews contain spoilers!

[Carol Chapin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was all over the place. The author is a neuroscientist who used MRI scanning to determine which parts of a dog’s brain are activated by various stimuli. The purpose was to compare animal brain functioning to that of humans, to determine similarities, and thus, how much they are like us.

The first part of the book describes how he managed to train dogs to submit to MRI scans while conscious, and how he developed and performed various experiments. It was not a simple task at all. From there, he went on to analyze the brains of sea lions, dolphins, and thylacines (an extinct Tasmanian marsupial that is a bit like a hyena). He devotes a chapter to how both Aboriginals and thylacines in Tasmania were wiped out by English settlers. There is quite a bit of knowledge in this book, but I didn’t feel like it all fit together very well.

One interesting finding was how dogs handle language. They don’t appear to react to nouns, but only to action verbs. But I’m oversimplifying. To quote the author, “…dogs seem to process…words in terms of actions associated with the objects…It may be that in a dog’s semantic space, actions and things are very close…The semantic representation for squirrel might be equivalent to ‘chase and kill’….The fact that we eventually taught the dogs the names of two objects showed that it wasn’t impossible…but imaging…suggested that the mechanism they used for encoding meaning was different from the mechanism that humans use.” This is an interesting difference, but the author also found many similarities between animal and human brain activity. This doesn’t surprise me because I feel that humans are also animals.

The author does a good job of explaining his feelings about his research in the second-to-last chapter. He discusses ethical treatment of animals. “The important question now is whether animals are aware of their suffering.” He states that the evidence that animals are self-aware is not at this time conclusive, but that animals are sentient. He also points out that it’s easy to convince people to be more aware of dogs, but that hasn’t been applied to many other animals. He makes convincing arguments to support better treatment of animals.

I don’t find fault the with author’s work or with his words. But the book was episodic and disorganized, which made it difficult to read.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a book about animal neuroscience, which is admittedly a harder read than a fluffy fiction piece, I certainly enjoyed What It's Like To Be A Dog.

Although the title focuses on the dog aspect of the book, the author explores the brains of several other animals. I feel like for what he advertises, there was a reasonable ratio of dog to other animal discussed in the book. I do understand that some readers might have expected it to be mostly about dogs, though.

The author's style flows well and it's quite easy to read, for a subject that doesn't lend itself easily to narrative. There were a few times that I was tempted to skim over, though - mainly explanations about how the MRI machine worked. But I overall enjoyed the structure of he book and how he laid it out fairly chronologically.

I was moved by his thoughts on how we treat animals and inspired to make changes in my own life to better respect the creatures we share this planet with.

Enjoyable read (though if you have zero interest in science this probably isn't the book for you).

[Nolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed this, and it deserves a higher rating than it gets. I realize the title points the way to creatures other than dogs, as does the introduction, but I would have enjoyed a somewhat more narrow topic. That said, this is written with a memorable style that is both easy to understand and always interesting.

Essentially, Burns relates his experiences with studying dogs and other animals using MRI technology in an effort to determine how these creatures think and what it might be like to be them. He rejects the idea that it is impossible to know what it's like to be another animal, and his reasons for rejecting that are laid out persuasively and in an easy-to-read manner.

If you read only pieces of this, at least read chapter eight, the section on how dogs process language. It will fascinate you and put to rest some of the myths about dogs who are capable of understanding hundreds and hundreds of words.

On balance, this is well worth your time and worth an Audible credit if that's the way to choose to read this.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did enjoy listening to this informational book, despite the fact it was not primarily about dogs. Maybe the title should be "Adventures is Animal Neuroscience, and we'll talk a little bit about dogs too". Well, I guess that also does not sound like a good title, but it would have given a better indication of what was in the book. The somewhat misleading title is really my only complaint with this book. It is well written and interesting. The brain is a complex and fascinating topic, and I was glad to spend some time learning more about it.

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not just about dogs, but also sea mammals, marsupials, extinction, conservation, animal rights and many important subjects for animal lovers. One of the chapters, about the extinct Tasmanian tiger, literally made me cry. Other parts, about animal experimentation, I had to skip altogether. This book may be preaching to the choir (honestly, if you’re a heartless b@stard who enjoys murdering animals, you probably won’t want to hear about how their brains work), but even readers who’ve never lived with dogs will find it fascinating.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't go into this book hoping to figure out what's going on in my lil' bastard's head, because he's a neurotic little guy (and that's part of his appeal, tbh), but I did come away from this book having a better idea of how to try to communicate with him, especially since my lil' bastard isn't food motivated. An interesting book that spends a LOT of time on tangents (interesting, but nonetheless) and could have used some tightening up.

[Jessica Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I keep flip flopping between three and four stars on this!! I, like many others, was hoping for more...dogs. Still, the studies described on other animals were interesting to me. Some parts were slow and thick reading but I feel like I learned a lot! I wouldn’t call this book a pleasure read - it took me a long time to get through- but I found the topic interesting enough to finish :)

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is slightly misleading, but I really enjoyed the implicit “Suck it, Nagel. We can know what it’s like to be a bat/dog/ crow/anything with a cortex. At least enough to say ‘Suck it, Nagel.”’

This book seems animated by love, curiosity, arrogance and guilt. Some of it was hard to read. Extinction is awful. Cruelty is awful. The Black War was awful. Dog lab is awful. Evil begins when we treat people as things. I strongly suspect that goes for anything with a cortex. May we be forgiven.

What is it like to be a dog? It’s like being a human without thumbs or language and with an amazing sense of smell. Worthy of love.

[Susan Paxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book; as others point out the title was badly chosen, and I suspect was selected by the publisher, not the author, as really what the author is doing via neurological research is to try and obtain insights into animal thinking. He started with dogs, since they can easily be trained to remain still in the MRI, then branched out into studies of the brains of dead - and sometimes extinct - animals. It's very interesting, sometimes moving, and offers glimpses into how animals experience their world.

[Jen (Remembered Reads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look through some experiments and developments in non-primate mammalian neuroscience. The studies of dogs and sea mammals were fascinating and will hopefully lead to additional discoveries in the future. The quest to find thylacine brains to run through an MRI was somewhat less so, but it did have a certain old school adventure-science style to it that was charming even if the results themselves were not necessarily particularly interesting.

But don't be fooled by the name and the handsome pointer on the cover: This is not a dog book.

[Ola · Rating 4 out of 5]

czytałam jak jeszcze nic nie wiedziałam o anatomii mózgu, ale nieźle bujało; imo mogli trochę bardziej na psach się skupić a nie o jakichś fokach pisać

[Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

didn't really learn what it was like to be a dog. good book though with fun tidbits

[Anna Andrienko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Важко оцінити, скоріше за все, тому що очікування були трохи інакші. Це цікава, наповнена маловідомими фактами, робота. Місцями сумна, місцями лякаюча (я свідомо пропустила опис лабораторних дослідів на живих собаках, дякую автору, що м'яко попередив заздалегідь). Але питання, що піднімаються, дуже важливі та актуальні, тож загалом для світогляду, це корисна книга.

[David Wineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

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