Category: People

New findings in self-awareness.

For dogs!

We humans take self-awareness for granted. The key measure, as I understand it, is our ability to recognise ourselves, as in a mirror or photograph, for example.

I have more than once mentioned in posts in this place, that the evolutionary journey for us humans and our canine companions has resulted in the two species now sharing a number of psychological and physical ailments.

But what has been implicitly understood is that the one thing that dogs and us do not share is self-awareness. Hitherto, it has been believed that dogs do not recognise themselves in the mirror test.

All of which is an introduction to an item that was recently posted on the ScienceAlert website and was brought to my attention by dear friend Dan Gomez.

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Guise Barbiani, Flickr
Guise Barbiani, Flickr

Dogs show signs of self-consciousness in new ‘sniff test’
We knew it!

BEC CREW 10 DEC 2015

Self-awareness might seem like the most basic part of life to us humans, but it’s a surprisingly rare concept when it comes to other animals. While great apes, dolphins, orcas, rhesus macaques, Eurasian magpies, and a single Asiatic elephant have all passed the self-recognition test, everything from pandas and pigeons to sea lions, gorillas, and several species of monkey have failed to show signs of consciousness.

Dogs were also on that list of failures – until now. Traditionally, self-consciousness is evaluated via the ‘mirror test’. If an animal uses its own reflection to examine or touch a red mark that’s been applied to its body without its knowledge, scientists can confirm that they possess some sense of self. But what if the animal isn’t that visually oriented?

“I believed that because dogs are much less sensitive to visual stimuli with respect to what, for example, humans and many apes are, it is likely that the failure of this and of other species in the mirror test is mainly due to the sensory modality chosen by the investigator to test the self-awareness and not, necessarily, to the absence of this latter,” says evolutionary biologist Roberto Cazzolla Gatti from Tomsk State University in Russia.

Gatti was prompted into this line of thinking by the fact that in past mirror tests, dogs have shown no interest in looking at their reflection in the mirror, but they will go ahead and sniff the area and possibly even urinate around it. While this got them a big old “fail” in previous studies, Gatti thought the behaviour warranted a closer look.

Back in 2001, renowned animal behaviour expert, Marc Bekoff, investigated the ‘mirror sniffing’ phenomenon via an experiment dubbed the ‘yellow snow test’. Yep it’s exactly what it sounds like. Over a five-year period, Bekoff took his dog Jethro on walks during the winter months, and timed how long he would sniff clumps of snow soaked in his own or other dogs’ urine.

The AnimalWise blog explains:

“Bekoff would wait until Jethro or other known female and male dogs urinated on snow, and then scoop up the clump of yellow snow as soon as Jethro was elsewhere and did not see him pick it up or move it (Bekoff used clean gloves each time and took other precautions to minimise odour and visual cues).

Bekoff then moved the yellow snow varying distances down the path so that Jethro would run across the displaced urine: (i) within about 10 seconds, (ii) between 10 and 120 seconds later, or (iii) between 120 and 300 seconds later. After Jethro arrived, Bekoff recorded how long he sniffed at the yellow snow, whether he urinated over it using the typical male raised-leg posture, and whether urination immediately followed the sniffing (‘scent marking’).”

Not surprisingly, Jethro paid a lot less attention to his own urine than he did to that of other dogs, so Bekoff concluded that his pet had to have some sense of self to be able to distinguish between scents. But with a sample size of one, the experiment wasn’t exactly going to set the scientific community on fire.

Gatti decided to come up with something a little more convincing. Called the Sniff Test of Self-Recognition (STSR), the experiment involved collecting urine samples from four stray dogs and systematically exposing them to the scents. He repeated this four times a year at the beginning of every season.

“I placed within a fence five urine samples containing the scent of each of the four dogs and a ‘blank sample’, filled only with cotton wool odourless,” he says. “The containers were then opened and each dog was individually introduced to the inside of the cage and allowed to freely move for 5 minutes. The time taken by each dog to sniff each sample was recorded.”

Just like Jethro, each dog spent way more time smelling the urine samples of other dogs than their own, which supports the hypothesis that they know their own scent and aren’t that interested in it. The result was stronger the older the dog, which suggests that self-awareness develops with age.

It might seem obvious that dogs would know their own scent, but if you’ve ever seen a dog bark at its own reflection, or completely ignore it – totally unaware of its own appearance and movements – you can see the significance.

“I demonstrated that even when applying it to multiple individuals living in groups and with different ages and sexes, this test provides significant evidence of self-awareness in dogs and can play a crucial role in showing that this capacity is not a specific feature of only great apes, humans, and a few other animals, but it depends on the way in which researchers try to verify it,” says Gatti.

The findings are published in the journal Ethology, Ecology and Evolution.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that sample size of four is pretty crap. And yep, it is, so we can’t really call this an official “pass” just yet. But the fact that we may well need to rethink the mirror test and figure out how to better align it with how certain species see the world is certainly worthy of a proper investigation. Certain behaviours such as empathy have been linked to self-awareness, and thanks to the ‘yawn test’, there’s evidence that dogs feel empathy towards their owners.

We’ll just have to wait and see if scientists are prepared to conduct a giant yellow snow test to put this conundrum to bed once and for all. In the meantime, here’s dolphins passing the mirror test adorably:

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Speaking of self-awareness, today, December 12th, is the centenary of the birth of Frank Sinatra.

Photo of Frank SINATRA, posed, c.early 1960s (Photo by GAB Archive/Redferns)
Photo of Frank SINATRA, posed, c.early 1960s (Photo by GAB Archive/Redferns)

What is Love?

Today’s post is inspired by something I read that is very special.

The last time I published a post headed What is love?, back in 2012, I included this:

I would imagine that there are almost as many ideas about the meaning of love as there are people on this planet.  Dictionary.com produces this in answer to the search on the word ‘love’.

love

[luhv]  noun, verb, loved, lov·ing.
noun

  1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
  2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.
  3. sexual passion or desire.
  4. a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person;sweetheart.
  5. (used in direct address as a term of endearment, affection,or the like): Would you like to see a movie, love?

But, I don’t know about you, those definitions leave something missing for me.  Here’s my take on what love is, and it’s only by having so many dogs in my life that I have found this clarity of thought.

“Love is trust, love is pure openness, love is knowing that you offer yourself without any barriers.  Think how you dream of giving yourself outwardly in the total surrender of love.  Reflect on that surrender that you experience when deeply connecting, nay loving, with your dog.“

One of the very special qualities of our dogs is their natural and instinctive ability to love, unconditionally, both us humans and other animals around them (with some notable exceptions; of course.)

Yet as much as we want to learn unconditional love from our dogs, there is something just too complex about us humans to manage that. Possibly rooted in our inability to really live in the present, another quality our dogs also demonstrate so perfectly.

In doing research for today’s post, I was amused by an article in The Guardian newspaper back in 2012, What is love? Five theories on the greatest emotion of all. Amused by there being just five theories!

That article opens:

“What is love” was the most searched phrase on Google in 2012, according to the company. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the question once and for all, the Guardian has gathered writers from the fields of science, psychotherapy, literature, religion and philosophy to give their definition of the much-pondered word.

So I sub-titled today’s post by saying that I was inspired by something.

Here it is, recently published over on The Conversation and republished within their terms. I think you are going to love it!

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The life-changing love of one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists

December 9, 2015

Author: Richard Underman, Chancellor’s Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University

Love is for everyone. mawazeFL/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Love is for everyone. mawazeFL/Flickr, CC BY-NC

One of the great short stories of the 20th century is Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Spinoza of Market Street. It tells of an aged scholar who has devoted his life to the study of Spinoza’s great work, Ethics. Protagonist Dr Fischelson has lost his library job and, like his hero, been expelled from his religious community for his heretical views. Looking down from his garret with disdain at the crowded street below him, he devotes his days to solitary scholarship. At night he gazes up through his telescope at the heavens, where he finds verification of his master’s wisdom.

Then one day Dr Fischelson falls ill. A neighbor, an uneducated “old maid,” nurses him back to health. Eventually, though the good doctor never understands exactly how or why, they are married. On the night of the wedding, after the unlikeliest of passionate consummations, the old man gazes up at the stars and murmurs, “Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.” He has learned that there is more to life than the theoretical speculations that have preoccupied him for decades.

The history of modern physics boasts its own version of Fischelson. His name was Paul Dirac. I first encountered Dirac in physics courses, but was moved to revisit his life and legacy through my service on the board of the Kinsey Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality and teaching an undergraduate course on sexuality and love.

A brilliant but very strange man

Born in Bristol, England, in 1902, Dirac became, after Einstein, the second most important theoretical physicist of the 20th century. He studied at Cambridge, where he wrote the first-ever dissertation on quantum mechanics. Shortly thereafter he produced one of physics’ most famous theories, the Dirac equation, which correctly predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac did more than any other scientist to reconcile Einstein’s general theory of relativity to quantum mechanics. In 1933 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, the youngest theoretical physicist ever to do so.

At the time Dirac received the Nobel Prize, he was leading a remarkably drab and, to most eyes,

Paul Dirac in 1933. Nobel Foundation via Wikimedia Commons
Paul Dirac in 1933. Nobel Foundation via Wikimedia Commons

unappealing existence. As detailed in Graham Farmelo’s wonderful biography, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, on which I rely heavily in this article, Dirac was an incredibly taciturn individual. Getting him to utter even a word could prove nearly impossible, leading his mischievous colleagues to introduce a new unit of measure for the rate of human speech, the Dirac, which amounted to one word per hour.

Dirac was the kind of man who would “never utter a word when no word would do.” Farmelo describes him as a human being completely absorbed in his work, with absolutely no interest in other people or their feelings, and utterly devoid of empathy. He attributes this in part to Dirac’s tyrannical upbringing. His father ruthlessly punished him for every error in speech, and the young Dirac adopted the strategy of saying as little as possible.

Dirac was socially awkward and showed no interest in the opposite sex. Some of his colleagues suspected that he might be utterly devoid of such feelings. Once, Farmelo recounts, Dirac found himself on a two-week cruise from California to Japan with the eminent physicist Werner Heisenberg. The gregarious Heisenberg made the most of the trip’s opportunities for fraternization with the opposite sex, dancing with the flapper girls. Dirac found Heisenberg’s conduct perplexing, asking him, “Why do you dance?” Heisenberg replied, “When there are nice girls, it is always a pleasure to dance.” Dirac pondered this for some minutes before responding, “But Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?”

Love finds the professor

Then one day, something remarkable entered Dirac’s life. Her name was Margit Wigner, the sister of a Hungarian physicist and recently divorced mother of two. She was visiting her brother at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Dirac had just arrived.

Known to friends and family as “Manci,” one day she was dining with her brother when she observed a frail, lost-looking young man walk into the restaurant. “Who is that?” she asked. “Why that is Paul Dirac, one of last year’s Nobel laureates,” replied her brother. To which she replied, “Why don’t you ask him to join us?”

Thus began an acquaintance that eventually transformed Dirac’s life. Writes Farmelo:

His personality could scarcely have contrasted more with hers: to the same extent that he was reticent, measured, objective, and cold, she was talkative, impulsive, subjective, and passionate.”

A self-described “scientific zero,” Manci embodied many things that were missing in Dirac’s life. After their first meeting, the two dined together occasionally, but Dirac, whose office was two doors down from Einstein, remained largely focused on his work.

After Manci returned to Europe, they maintained a lopsided correspondence. Manci wrote letters that ran to multiple pages every few days, to which Dirac responded with a few sentences every few weeks. But Manci was far more attuned than Dirac to a “universally acknowledged truth” best expressed by Jane Austen: “A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

She persisted despite stern warnings from Dirac:

I am afraid I cannot write such nice letters to you – perhaps because my feelings are so weak and my life is mainly concerned with facts and not feelings.

When she complained that many of her queries about his daily life and feelings were going unanswered, Dirac drew up a table, placing her questions in the left column, paired with his responses on the right. To her question, “Whom else should I love?” Dirac responded, “You should not expect me to answer this question. You would say I was cruel if I tried.” To her question, “Are there any feelings for me?” Dirac answered only, “Yes, some.”

Realizing that Dirac lacked the insight to see that many of her questions were rhetorical, she informed him that “most of them were not meant to be answered.” Eventually, exasperated by Dirac’s lack of feeling, Manci wrote to him that he should “get a second Nobel Prize in cruelty.” Dirac wrote back:

You should know that I am not in love with you. It would be wrong for me to pretend that I am, as I have never been in love I cannot understand fine feelings.

Yet with time, Dirac’s outlook began to change. After returning from a visit with her in Budapest, Dirac wrote, “I felt very sad leaving you and still feel that I miss you very much. I do not understand why this should be, as I do not usually miss people when I leave them.” The man whose mathematical brilliance had unlocked new truths about the fundamental nature of the universe was, through his relationship with Manci, discovering truths about human life that he had never before recognized.

Soon thereafter, when she returned for a visit, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted immediately. The couple went on two honeymoons little more than month apart. Later he wrote to her:

Manci, my darling, you are very dear to me. You have made a wonderful alteration in my life. You have made me human… I feel that life for me is worth living if I just make you happy and do nothing else.

A Soviet colleague of Dirac corroborated his friend’s self-assessment: “It is fun to see Dirac married, it makes him so much more human.”

In Dirac, a thoroughly theoretical existence acquired a surprisingly welcome practical dimension.

Paul and Manci in 1963. GFHund via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Paul and Manci in 1963. GFHund via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

A man who had been thoroughly engrossed in the life of the mind discovered the life of the heart. And a human being whose greatest contributions had been guided by the pursuit of mathematical beauty discovered something beautiful in humanity whose existence he had never before suspected.

In short, a brilliant but lonely man found something new and wonderful that had been missing his entire life: love. As my students and I discover in the course on sexuality and love, science can reveal a great deal, but there are some aspects of reality – among them, love – that remain largely outside its ambit.

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Picking up on that last sentence, “there are some aspects of reality – among them, love – that remain largely outside its ambit.” all I can offer is to introduce dogs to the students!

I struggled for ages wondering how to close today’s post. In the end, decided on the following:

Just in case you missed my previous promotion!

My promotion yesterday of my KAJO interview!

Yes, I know I’m running the risk of being a pain in the arse but …

kajo_2015

In just six hours time my interview by Kyle Dunlap of the radio station KAJO will be aired.

Recording the interview on the 23rd October.
Recording the interview on the 23rd October with Kyle in the background.

You will see the On Air button to click just to the right of the KAJO 1270am logo.

on_air_rain

It will have Kyle Dunlap’s name on it when you “tune in” at 12:45 PST later today.

 

KAJO author interview

Would love you to listen to this.

kajo_2015

In exactly twenty-four hours from now, you will have the opportunity to listen to Kyle Dunlap of the radio station KAJO interviewing me about my book: Learning from Dogs.

The interview, that was pre-recorded on the 23rd November, is part of KAJO’s community broadcasts where they speak to local authors. As a newbie author, I was delighted and flattered to be asked to participate.

Anyway!

The broadcast is a little after 12:45 Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday, 8th December. If you are not in the USA, you can check the equivalent time easily at The World Clock website.

It is being broadcast live on KAJO’s website

You will see the On Air button to click just to the right of the KAJO 1270am logo. Here is the “Click to Listen Live” button grabbed from the KAJO website at 3:20pm yesterday.

on_air_rain

It will have Kyle Dunlap’s name on it when you “tune in” at 12:45 tomorrow.

If you do listen to the interview do leave a comment below – good or bad! 😉

Changes to the Blog

No! It’s not your eyes! 😉

I should have sent this out earlier to you all.

For a few hours ago the WordPress theme I am using on Learning from Dogs was changed.

The change is necessary to allow a number of eCommerce features to be added to the blog in connection with me being able to sell my book, both in paperback and eBook formats, directly to you good people.

Plus there’s a real bonus.

This theme is mobile friendly.

In other words, everything on Learning from Dogs will be much, much easier to read on tablets and smartphones.

Finally, if anyone is within reach of Grants Pass then you have a warm welcome to come along on Saturday, December 12th. There will be some specials available to visitors only.

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Why Am I Talking?

At first, this may seem like a rather bizarre question.

Before plunging in to today’s post, can I just explain, especially to those who are new to this place, why there has been a preponderance of republished articles from other sources in recent times. (And that’s not to say that these articles aren’t fascinating reads; by the way.)

While my book is now available, I am still just over a week away from a formal launch, both here on Learning from Dogs, and locally in the town of Grants Pass. However, the level of demands upon me in connection with the launch is building rapidly. For example, on Friday a team from the local Daily Courier are coming here in connection with a feature article that they want to write. On Saturday, Jean and I have a stand at a local craft fair. Next Tuesday I have my fingers crossed that there will be a radio broadcast from local KAJO about the book on their local community slot. (More details will be published here once the time and day has been confirmed.)

I’m sure you get the picture!

So with all that out of the way, here’s a wonderful sequel to my recent posts on Stillness and Happiness. It is a fascinating essay from Val Boyco under the heading of  W.A.I.T., republished with Val’s kind permission.

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W.A.I.T. ?

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Val Boyko

I love to work with people on becoming better communicators. The key, of course, is to learn to really listen – becoming engaged listeners and tuning into the other person, rather than letting our own thoughts take us away from the moment and distract us.

But before we even get to this step, there is one vital piece of wisdom to absorb.

When we are talking we are not listening.

1-2

So, the question to ask yourself is : Why Am I Talking?…

Have you ever considered why you are talking? It is usually more than sharing valuable information; that’s for sure!
Next time you notice you are talking, consider these questions:

  • Am I trying to release something that’s bottled up?
  • Am I trying to persuade someone to my point of view?
  • Is it a habit?
  • Am I trying to work through something out loud?
  • Do I have an unmet personal need that I am trying to get met? For example: a need for validation, attention, love, approval, recognition or to be right.
  • Do I find talking entertaining?
  • Am I uncomfortable with silence?
  • Do I believe that people really need all the information I am providing, that I am being helpful or teaching something?
  • To explore more, you may want to write W.A.I.T.? on a post-it note before your next meeting and notice what comes up for you.

When we become aware of our talking, we are in a better position to choose whether we want to continue or not. Enjoy tuning in to yourself this week.. and this video.

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Guess I have nothing more to say! 😉

Stillness!

One of the classic lessons we can learn from our dearest dogs.

In yesterday’s post, towards the end of the essay by Russell McLendon was the following paragraph:

All this may seem like an esoteric quest for neuroscientists, but it’s about more than just academic curiosity. By knowing which parts of the human brain generate our sensation of happiness, we might develop more accurate ways to test methods of becoming happier, like travel, exercise or meditation.

I have written before on the subject of stillness and how important it is for us humans. That was a post back in August where I shared an interesting talk by Pico Iyer The Art of Stillness.

Anyway, back to yesterday’s post and the essay that was linked to from the word “meditation”. An essay that I am going to republish in full, within the terms of Mother Nature Network.

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Russell Simmons says meditation is the key to greater happiness

Business magnate shares the benefits and practice of daily meditation in his new book ‘Success Through Stillness.’

By: Michael d’Estries, March 6, 2014

Book cover of "Success Through Stillness"
Book cover of “Success Through Stillness”

For those wondering if the daily practice of meditation really works, Russell Simmons has both a succinct response and a more in-depth answer totaling more than 220 pages.

“Today my new book ‘Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple’ comes out,” he recently wrote in a blog post. “As the title suggests, it is a very straight-forward, easy-to-digest guide on how to get past whatever misconceptions or apprehensions you might have about meditation and learn how to use this simple yet incredibly effective tool.
“As I move around talking about the book, one question I seem to get asked over and over again is, ‘Does meditaion really work?’ And my answer is always an unequivocal ‘YES!'”

The 56-year-old vegan and healthy living guru, who has built a net worth estimated at more than $340 million, says he was skeptical at first that 40 minutes of daily meditation could do anything to stem the anxiety he was feeling.

“The idea of being still and operating from a calm place is one that I never would’ve thought would’ve suited my lifestyle or my goals or the way that I pursue life, ’cause I pursue everything with a vigor,” he told Yahoo! News.

Simmons explains that he practices mantra-based meditation, in which one repeats a word or sound for a period of 20 minutes. Simmons repeats the word “Rum” over and over, a process he says has led him to greater happiness.

“I come out of meditation, and sometimes I just start giggling, I feel so happy, right in the mornings,” he shares.

According to a study released earlier this year, while feelings of happiness may not necessarily occur for all practitioners of meditation, reductions in anxiety, depression and possibly pain are possible.

“Meditation helps young people and adults to get control of the noise,” says Simmons. “The noise is the cause of almost all sickness and sadness. If we can calm the noise, our relationship with the world benefits tremendously.”

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If you would like to buy a copy of Simmons’ book, in Kindle, Hardback or Paperback formats, then do click on the link below.

Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple

Finally, to underline how dogs are such wonderful examples of being still, do enjoy the following photograph that was taken earlier yesterday morning.

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From left-to-right: Cleo; Oliver; Sweeny; Hazel; Jeannie; Pedy.

I truly envy a dog’s ability to be still so easily!

These extraordinary minds of ours.

Serendipity at work.

Chapter 8 of my book is entitled: Behaviours and Relationships. It opens thus:

“It is all to do with relationships.”

I heard this many years before the idea of writing this book came to me. Heard it from J, who was referred to in the previous chapter. J was speaking of what makes for happy people in all walks of life. It’s one of those remarks that initially comes over as such an obvious statement, akin to water being wet or the night being dark, that it is easy to miss the incredible depth of meaning behind those seven words.

Humans are fascinating. Every aspect of who we are can be seen in our relationships. How we relate to people around us, whether it be a thirty-second exchange with a stranger or a long natter with friends whom we have known for decades, including our partners and family relations. The core relationship, of course, the relationship that drives so many of our behaviours is the relationship that we have with ourself. That being rooted in our relationship experiences with the adults around us when we were young people.

When one looks at the performance of successful companies one often sees, nay one always sees, people being valued. The directors and managers of those companies understand that if people are valued then a myriad of benefits flow from that approach to relationships. Moving out of the workplace, the relationships that people have are always stronger and happier if those individual persons know they are valued. Moving beyond people, our dogs, and many other animals, are always stronger and happier if they feel valued. It’s the difference between empathy and sympathy.

Recently over on Mother Nature Network there was an essay presented by Russell McLendon who is science editor for MNN. It is about happiness.

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Happiness is all in your head

Scientists say they’ve found where happiness happens in the brain. What does that mean?

By: Russell McLendon, November 24, 2015

Understanding how our brains generate happiness could help make it less elusive, researchers say. (Photo: Andrew Vargas/Flickr)
Understanding how our brains generate happiness could help make it less elusive, researchers say. (Photo: Andrew Vargas/Flickr)

Everyone wants to be happy. Yet despite all our efforts in pursuit of this prized emotion, it can be a surprisingly nebulous goal. What is “happiness,” exactly?

That question has puzzled philosophers for thousands of years, and it’s still tricky for anyone to tackle. But recent advances in neuroscience have finally begun to shed light on it, and now a new study claims to have found an answer. Being told happiness is “all in your head” may seem both obvious and dismissive, but in this case the specifics are also empowering. The more we know about how (and where) happiness happens, the less helpless we’ll be to summon it when we need it.

By comparing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with questionnaires about emotional states, researchers from Kyoto University in Japan say they’ve traced the experience of happiness to a specific part of the human brain. Overall happiness, they conclude, occurs when positive emotions combine with a sense of life satisfaction in the precuneus, a region of the medial parietal lobe that’s linked to important brain tasks like episodic memory, self-reflection and consciousness.

Psychologists already distinguish between broad life satisfaction and “subjective well-being,” since happiness often seems to fade during bad moods without necessarily plunging us into deeper existential despair. But by revealing the neural mechanics of how these feelings combine to create overall happiness, the authors of the new study hope to make it easier to objectively quantify this mysterious and elusive emotion.

“Over history, many eminent scholars like Aristotle have contemplated what happiness is,” lead author Wataru Sato says in a press release. “I’m very happy that we now know more about what it means to be happy.”

Scientists used MRI brain scans to identify happiness in a brain region known as the precuneus. (Photo: Kyoto University)
Scientists used MRI brain scans to identify happiness in a brain region known as the precuneus. (Photo: Kyoto University)

To pinpoint the location of happiness, Sato and his colleagues first used MRI to scan the brains of their study subjects. Those participants then took a survey, which asked about their general sense of happiness, the intensity of their emotions and the degree of their overall life satisfaction.

After analyzing the data, the researchers discovered that those who scored higher on the happiness survey also had more gray matter mass in the precuneus. That means this brain region is larger in people who feel happiness more intensely, feel sadness less intensely and who are better able to find meaning in life.

“To our knowledge, our study is the first to show that the precuneus is associated with subjective happiness,” the researchers write in the journal Scientific Reports.

Complex phenomena like happiness rarely boil down to a single brain region, but other recent research also points to an outsized role for the precuneus. A study published this month links impaired connectivity in the precuneus to depression, for example, and a 2014 study suggests the region is a “distinct hub” in the brain’s default-mode network, which is active during self-reflection and daydreaming.

All this may seem like an esoteric quest for neuroscientists, but it’s about more than just academic curiosity. By knowing which parts of the human brain generate our sensation of happiness, we might develop more accurate ways to test methods of becoming happier, like travel, exercise or meditation.

“Several studies have shown that meditation increases grey matter mass in the precuneus,” Sato says. “This new insight on where happiness happens in the brain will be useful for developing happiness programs based on scientific research.”

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It’s an unscientific opinion from me but I truly believe that humans have a bias towards happiness. And if there’s one animal that we can learn happiness from, it’s the dog!

Photo: Kiuko/flickr.
Photo: Kiuko/flickr.

Feeding our furry friends.

An insight into the eating behaviours of cats and dogs.

As it happens, Jean and I are vegetarians; Jean going way back in years to when she first turned away from meat. Thus the only meat that we purchase is from Cartwrights’, a local butcher in Grants Pass, where we buy hearts and liver for the dogs. The cats are fed on dried cat biscuits and canned cat food.

All owners of cats and dogs know that they have very different eating habits, and behaviours.

So to put some flesh on the bone, so to speak, about the eating behaviours of cats and dogs I am going to republish a recent essay that appeared over on The Conversation. As always, it is republished within the terms of The Conversation.

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Why cats are fussy eaters but dogs will consume almost anything

by Hannah Rowland, Lecturer in Ecology and Evolution & Research Fellow at Zoological Society of London, University of Cambridge

November 13, 2015

Anyone who’s watched a cat throwing up after munching on grass knows that our feline friends aren’t natural plant eaters. So you might be surprised to discover that these carnivorous animals share some important genes that are more typically associated with herbivores. And this might help explain why cats aren’t always easy to please when it comes to food.

New research suggests that cats possess the genes that protect vegetarian animals from ingesting poisonous plants by giving them the ability to taste bitter. Animals use their sense of taste to detect whether a potential food is nutritious or harmful. A sweet taste signals the presence of sugars, an important source of energy. A bitter taste, on the other hand, evolved as a defence mechanism against harmful toxins commonly found in plants and unripe fruits.

Evolution has repeatedly tweaked animals’ taste buds to suit various dietary needs. Changes in an animal’s diet can eliminate the need to sense certain chemicals in food, and so receptor genes mutate, destroying their ability to make a working protein.

I can haz chlorophyll. Lisa Sympson/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
I can haz chlorophyll. Lisa Sympson/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

One example of this comes from strictly meat-eating cats, who can no longer taste sweetness. But if bitter detection evolved to warn of plant toxins, then it stands to reason that cats, which (usually) eschew plants, shouldn’t be able to taste bitter either. Humans and other vegetable-munching animals can taste bitter because we possess bitter taste receptor genes. If cats have lost the ability to taste bitterness, we should find that their receptor genes are riddled with mutations.

Geneticists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia scoured the genome of cats and other carnivorous mammals like dogs, ferrets, and polar bears to see if our carnivorous cousins have bitter genes. They were surprised to find that cats have 12 different genes for bitter taste. Dogs, ferrets, and polar bears are equally well endowed. So, if meat eating animals are unlikely to encounter any bitter morsels, why do they boast genes for tasting bitterness?

Taste test

To find out, Peihua Jiang, a molecular biologist at Monell, put cat taste buds to the test. He inserted the cat taste receptor gene into human tissue cells in the lab. When combined, the cell and the gene act as a taste receptor that responds to chemicals dropped onto it.

Jiang discovered that the cat’s taste receptors responded to bitter chemicals found in toxic plants and to compounds that also activate human bitter receptors. The cat bitter taste receptor, known as Tas2r2, responded to the chemical denatonium benzoate, a bitter substance commonly smeared on the fingernails of nail-biting children.

So why have cats retained the ability to detect bitter tastes? Domestic cats owners know how unpredictable cats’ dietary choices can be. Some of the “presents” cats bring to their owners include frogs, toads, and other animals that can contain bitter and toxic compounds in their skin and bodies. Jiang’s results show that bitter receptors empower cats to detect these potential toxins, giving them the ability to reject noxious foods and avoid poisoning.

Hair of the dog. Michal Hrabovec/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
Hair of the dog. Michal Hrabovec/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

But how often do meat-loving cats actually get exposed to bitter and toxic compounds in their diet, compared with the plethora of plant toxins that their vegetarian counterparts have to contend with? Jiang suggests this is not enough to explain why cats have retained such an arsenal of receptors.

Instead, cat taste receptors may have evolved for reasons other than taste. In humans, bitter taste receptors are found not only in the mouth, but also in the heart and in the lungs, where they are thought to detect infections. It remains to be seen if feline bitter receptor genes also double-up as disease detectors.

The discovery of feline bitter receptors might explain why cats have got a reputation as picky eaters. But their unfussy canine counterparts have a similar number of bitter taste receptors – so why are cats so finicky? One answer might lie in how the cat receptors detect bitter-tasting compounds. Research published earlier this year by another team of researchers showed that some of the cat taste receptors are especially sensitive to bitter compounds, and even more sensitive to denatonium than the same receptor in humans.

Perhaps cats are also more sensitive to bitter chemicals than dogs, or they may detect a greater number of bitter compounds in their everyday diet. Food that tastes bland to us or to a dog could be an unpleasant gastronomic experience for cats. So rather than branding cats as picky, perhaps we should think of them as discerning feline foodies.

ooOOoo

Once again, I find it wonderful and incredible that there is so much knowledge and experience “out there” and how quickly a few clicks of a computer mouse can make it available to all of you wonderful readers!

And with that, it’s time to go off and feed the dogs. (Only showing off – Jean is the one who feeds both our dogs and our cats!)

Speaking of Jean – it’s her birthday today!

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