DailyDirt: Man's Best Friends
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Dogs have been domesticated for thousands of years, and there’s been some speculation that humans and dogs have co-evolved to some extent. So it would be nice to understand our domesticated friends a bit better, and technology could help us out. We’ve seen products like Bowlingual for translating dog barks into human languages, and here are just a few more interesting links on human-dog relationships.
- Researchers are using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to try to understand what dogs are thinking. Two dogs have been trained to stand completely still while their brains are scanned, and one of the dogs is a squirrel-hunting dog — so maybe these neuroscientists will be able to see what part of a dog’s brain activates when someone says, “Squirrel!” [url]
- Doggelganger is a fun way to match up people and dogs that are up for adoption. Dogs and their owners are supposed to grow to look like each other, but what if facial recognition software made it possible for you to adopt a dog that already looked like you from the start? [url]
- Does neutering pets cause any kind of depression for our beloved domesticated animals? Vets may want to change the way they make pets sterile if enough pet owners are convinced that there’s even a possibility of post-neutering depression. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: bowlingual, brain, depression, doggelganger, dogs, fmri, neutering, pets
Comments on “DailyDirt: Man's Best Friends”
gotta get some neuticles
neuticles are a real thing. kid. you. not.
Re: gotta get some neuticles
I wonder if they use them for people.
“Hey Doc, just how big do they make these things?”
Re the last bullet item, BMW’s currently running commercial, which it has posted on YT, gives some insight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlvK-SRKdII
“Researchers are using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to try to understand what dogs are thinking. Two dogs have been trained to stand completely still while their brains are scanned, and one of the dogs is a squirrel-hunting dog — so maybe these neuroscientists will be able to see what part of a dog’s brain activates when someone says, “Squirrel!”
This has to be a miniature schnauzer!!! My grandparents inlaw have one named Goliath and he will go straight to the back sliding glass door when he hears that word 🙂
ALL dogs go to heaven...
…and ALL copyright maximalists can go to hell !
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
Re:
“trying to be still” … “trying to be still”… “why??”…. “trying to be still”.. SQUIRREL… SHUTUP… trying to be still…
Dogs dont tend to think all that much, not that they are not very smart, but they dont analyse, or ponder things, they function more like a computer, they are ‘programmed’, they react to events by reacting the way they have learned to react.
a great deal of research has gone and in going into dog behaviour, much is known and it’s a very interesting subject.
it is clear that humans would not have progressed at this rate (or possibly at all) without the assistance of the dog.