I know that feeling, Dude - When your dog understands you

People talks... to things. And I am not talking about people that talks alone, an act of modern schizophrenia that is more recurring everyday. I am talking about talking to the TV, computer, toaster, chair, keyboard, remote control. Things.

Attempting to define "thing" is a matter of extreme complexity that belongs to an emerging field of urban philosophy. The gurus of such field live in small temples distributed among several cities called "taxi drivers".
John, an acquainted taxi driver of mine, drives people around day and night. Many times he insulted his car whenever it failed, because: It is always easier to kick it than taking it to the repair shop.

Despite the definition, we all can agree that "the thing" never responds to any input, good or bad.

If we had a thing-o-meter we could arrange a whole range of them, from the toilet paper to us, passing by the computer, the pothos and Bobby, a stray dog that found a home (I take for granted that any person that call his/her son "Bobby" is expecting that he'll be a "good boy!").

The thing is that there's things that we feel more fond with. This has something to do with a degree of empathy we have for species that are evolutivelly close to us. It is a lot easier to overcome the death of a frog, than the death of the family dog or a chimpanzee.

Curious thing to consider is that our species diverged from other primates a couple of years ago (like, 6 million years ago). The one sitting there, right next to the dining table, expecting you to give him some food: Bobby, has evolutivelly distanced from us 100 million years ago. Apes, nearly humans, sleep under the rain in the jungle; while dogs, nearly wolves, can sleep in a skyscraper at New York.

Pets offer that balance between "give me your company, today it's cold and it's raining like there's no tomorrow" and "bug off! I'm busy". They are always there, independently dependent, perfectly functional for the moment we need them, whenever we need, a thing that is not a thing; something that makes us feel better and never requieres explanations about anything or may hurt our feelings, nor challenge us intellectually.

Yet, bobby is not "a thing". It does not "break" and can be easily fixed like a toaster. Neither is he a pothos. Bobby is one of those things that is not so "thingy", Bobby is the kind of thing one speaks to as if he understood: He somehow responds to his name, comes whenever he's called (If he wants), hides his face whenever one screams to him because he chewed on the Japanese sex doll, and other cool things.

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Upon the growing theory that stated that Bobby spoke human, a group of Hungarian researchers set themselves to the task of understanding, why is the dog man's best friend? They grabbed 11 Bobbys and placed them in a MRI scanner (one at a time), the same kind there's at any hospital, putted earphones on them and made them listen different sounds: Human voices, canine voices and ambient sounds. Later, they performed the same test with a group of human volunteers, these ones, were easier to train. They compared both results checking that: If a Bobby asked for something to another Bobby, the same part of the brain lit up compared to the human brain even when dreaming (yes, dogs do dream).

Stimuli are processed in different stages. In the case of sound, passing through the ears until it reaches the primary auditory cerebral cortex, then the secondary and then a few other stages where thing become a bit more complex, until we are able to understand the semantic load inf phrases such as "I love you" or "It's not you, it's me".

Our Hungarian friends found out that the sound of human voice activated the primary cortex in the doggies, this was expected, but it also lit up other regions in the cortex, similar to the ones that activate in the human brain when they processed human voices and that they are related to the voice processing. It is very likely that, the ability to process voices among individuals of different species is a trait that appeared a lot sooner that we may speculate.

But the fun part of the experiment came later, when they made dogs listen human voices with different emotional charges, from a desperate cry to a passionate sporting scream ("RUN, you slob!"), even a hilarious laughter. It was found that the canine brain did not only light up at the primary cortex, but also a small part that is right next to it, the area that in humans is associated (now, in dogs too) to the emotion processing.

Resuming: It seems like dogs and primates have a region in their cerebral cortex that is specifically built to process voices among the same species, but they also have an area to interpret "our" voice, that is pretended to be able to understand emotional charge.

Now, we are able to understand why when we are happy, our canine family members. Now, we can understand why a dog will defend a scared child, even when his cry is nowhere near a pup's. Now, we understand our best friends. We understand why we feel empathy for them, because: A pothos does not "give the paw".