What Is My Dog Thinking?

October 24, 2023donnabarten Leave a comment

The author and her Vizsla, Henry, as a young dog

There are dog owners who are positive they know exactly what their dogs are thinking, and they are the ones who tend to anthropomorphize and project their own thoughts upon the dog. Say this dog owner is named Betty. My guess is that much of the time Betty is right, but probably not to the extent that she supposes. Scientists have recently been able to do advanced experiments to get a better sense of what the dog’s mind is capable of thinking. It was two books by Dr. Gregory Berns that got me started learning about what neuroscience and behavioral analyses could tell us about our favorite companions.

A dog’s brain is about the size of a lemon with about 5 billion neurons vs. the 80 billion we have. The olfactory bulb, ~ 10% of the dog’s total brain, helps them process smells. It is absent in humans and, not surprisingly, dogs’ sense of smell is 100,000 times more acute than that of a human. On the other hand, the frontal lobes in the dog, the thinking part of the brain, are also about 10% of the volume, so dogs have evolved with the same brain capacity for processing scent and for thinking. The frontal lobes in humans are 30% of their total brain. Just knowing that means dogs must perceive the world differently than we do.

Dr. Berns uses fMRI brain imaging to ask his questions. The “f” stands for functional, MRI is “magnetic resonance imaging” and, using huge, clanking magnets, he can measure the areas that are most active in the brains of awake subjects. When nerve cells are working, they have high energy needs and cause a localized increase in blood flow to get the nutrients and oxygen to where it is needed. fMRI measures those blood flow changes. This technique has revolutionized neuroscience research for humans, as it allows scientists to see what parts of human brains turn on when we think about different things. It is much trickier to do these experiments in dogs, and that is where some of the beauty of Dr. Berns’ work comes in. He and other volunteers trained their dogs to keep their heads completely still (movement destroys the images), and to do so in the confined and noisy environment of the fMRI.

Images from: Functional MRI in Awake Unrestrained Dogs, by Gregory S Berns, Andrew M Brooks, and Mark Spivak

Cool fMRI Experiments in Awake Dogs

Dr. Berns and his colleagues devised clever ways to test what dogs were thinking with the use of previous training, hand signals and sensory stimuli, while the dogs kept immobile for the moments needed to capture the signal. Their first simple experiments took months to complete because they had to figure everything out from scratch. If you are interested in the details, I highly recommend reading his first book. They trained the dogs that one hand signal meant a delicious treat was coming (anticipation of a reward) and the other meant nothing interesting would happen. The dog brains showed activation in the fMRI in a region called the caudate nucleus with the anticipation hand signal, already known to be the reward center in humans. Activation of our caudate nucleus is linked to desire and craving, becoming dysfunctional in addiction. So when my dog Henry danced around anticipating the dinner I was preparing for him, he was actually anticipating that meal with pleasure like I thought he was.

In another set of experiments, Dr. Berns and his colleagues exposed the dogs to cotton swabs with sweat from their owner, an unknown human, or from the anal glands of themselves, known or unknown dogs. This allowed measurements from a sensory system they preferred, and it was no surprise to see the olfactory bulbs light up in the fMRI with all tested odors. What was most interesting was the dog brain’s response to the scent of their owner’s sweat. It also lit up the caudate nucleus (Yes, you remember, it’s anticipation and reward), as well as the inferior temporal lobe associated with memory functions. The owner was not present, so the fMRI signals told us that the dogs remembered the owner as special and distinct. “These patterns of brain activation look strikingly similar to those observed when humans are shown pictures of people they love.” So when our friend Betty believes her dog loves her as much as she does, this may be true. Or it may be a variation on the theme, but something special is definitely happening.

Also, dog owners often refer to their pets as their dog-babies, and many young couples will get a puppy before committing to parenthood to try out the idea of caring for another being. Behavioral scientists determined that the dog-human attachment style was similar to the infant-caregiver style and that the dog-dog attachment style was more like a sibling interaction, once again validating what many dog lovers instinctively feel. In addition, jealousy of human attention to another dog has been recorded in the scientific literature, just like siblings.

My mother always said that living with a dog was like living with a perpetual toddler, and I have found that to be true as well! One of the studies Dr. Berns conducted was on impulse control. In What It’s Like To Be A Dog, he showed that dogs do have some impulse control but that it varies a lot between individuals, just like in humans. The level of fMRI activity in the prefrontal cortex of the dogs correlated with each dog’s result from an independent test of impulse control. In humans the prefrontal cortex is involved in executive decisions and self-control and is an area not well developed in small children. Based on their overall performance… yes, dogs are permanent toddlers in the home.

Dogs and Human Language

One of the most fascinating parts of that book was Dr. Berns’ investigation of language comprehension. There are a few famous border collies who have been documented to understand the names of hundreds of different words when asked to retrieve specific objects. Chaser probably holds the record with 1022 words and even some noun-verb pairings. His owner, John Pilley, trained and played with him for 4-5 hours a day, which was surely related to this dog’s phenomenal success, but it couldn’t have happened without Chaser’s innate intelligence.

We’ve tried to teach our Standard Poodle toy names and been surprised at how difficult it has been to get beyond the name of a few favorites. According to one measure of dog breed intelligence, poodles are number 2—right behind border collies—so what is going on? It turns out that Berns and his volunteers were also frustrated. They had troubles teaching recognition of just 2 objects to their dogs, to the point where the dogs still made lots of mistakes after 6 months of training. When they were finally imaged for language recognition, Berns used those two words along with some nonsense words. The nonsense words activated the brain the most, indicating that the dogs knew they were different and they should pay attention. But the known words, after all that training, were not lighting up the auditory or visual cortex in the same way that humans do after they hear a word they recognize. Our fMRI signals show that we can imagine it in our mind’s eye. This means that dogs do not understand language the same way we do and the old Gary Larson “What Dogs Hear” cartoon is probably pretty accurate. Sorry, Betty.

But dogs do have their own intelligence which is exquisitely tuned in to human behavior, and so Dr. Berns thinks about the question of language in a new way. Humans like to name everything. Sight is our primary sense and from the youngest age we are taught what different objects are. There are ten times more nouns than verbs in the English language. But what if dogs have an action-based, rather than an object-based world view?

“In an action-based worldview, everything would be transactional. Even emotions might be represented as actions. Fear would become that feeling in which I need to get away from something. Loneliness would be that feeling which is lessened by waiting by the door until it opens and then goes away.

“I am not just anthropomorphizing. The words I used were a necessary construct of communicating an idea in written form. A dog could not think the literal words I wrote, because the dog doesn’t have the brain architecture for thinking in words. An action-based semantic system does not mean, however, that fear is just the set of motor programs that an animal implements to escape something unpleasant. The motoric aspects are important, but so is the subjective awareness of what’s happening, for that is where we have common ground.”

If we really want to understand what our dogs are thinking, maybe it means we need to twist our thinking a little to get into their point of view. Perhaps what my Henry was really hearing was Blah Blah Blah Go Out Henry, Blah Blah Henry, Blah blah Eat blah blah.

_{Henry demonstrates impulse control with his dinner.}

Key references:

How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist And His Adopted Dog Decode The Canine Brain by Gregory Berns

What It’s Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience by Gregory Berns

Donna Barten is a novelist and scientist working on her second book Imprint and Inheritance. Henry, her beloved companion passed on before this blog was published.

Psychiatric Holocaust

September 12, 2023September 12, 2023donnabarten 8 Comments

Eugenics and the Monstrous Objective of “Racial Purity”

Victims of the Nazi T4 Program- Museum of Dr. Guislan

The Nazi Party embraced an ideology of purifying their population from anyone deemed genetically inferior—to create a master race that would take their “rightful place” as the masters of Europe. It was at the top of Hitler’s agenda and he and his henchmen worked hard to make it happen. Although much has been published on the concentration camps that sterilized and exterminated European Jews, along with gypsies, homosexuals and other “undesirables,” most people don’t know about the preceding systematic sterilization and, finally, execution of the mentally ill.

By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, the field of Eugenics was firmly established in Europe, the United States and other nations. It was based on the faulty extension of Darwin’s work to humanity, initially promoted by Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, in 1883. Mental disorders, and particularly schizophrenia, were believed to be genetically transmitted as a Mendelian recessive gene in the population. Nazis reasoned that if those with these disorders or other imperfect characteristics were prevented from reproducing, then these genes would disappear from the general population.

Part of the justification for later “euthanasia,” endorsed by many prominent psychiatrists in both Europe and the US, was economic. Educational campaigns in Germany emphasized how much each mentally ill patient cost the government and the taxpayers, especially between the World Wars when cash-strapped Germany was suffering from economic retribution by the victors of WWI.

This poster promoted the Nazi magazine Neues Volk, the caption reads: “This hereditarily ill person will cost our national community 60,000 Reichsmarks over the course of his lifetime. Citizen, this is your money.” 1938

US Holocaust Museum, Public Domain

The eugenics field recommended sterilization of the mentally ill and it became common practice in many Western countries. In the US, Indiana required it by law in 1907, and by the 1930s the majority of states followed suit. Heinous forced and improperly disclosed sterilizations were also performed by the US government on Black, Puerto Rican and Native American women through the 1970s with the express purpose of reducing their populations.

The Nazi regime in Germany became fanatical about eugenics and racial purity, taking it further than any other country. They required psychiatrists to fill out forms about all their patients to provide a database of those who should be prevented from reproducing. Many psychiatrists enthusiastically supported the government policy and the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring was passed in 1933. Approximately 400,000 Germans, many living in the community, were subjected to involuntary sterilization. An estimated 26% had schizophrenia.

Hitler and his cronies wanted to take it further, but they knew they had to be careful of public opinion, even in Germany. The quiet authorization of the T4 program to murder mental health patients was signed by Hitler himself. It was backdated to September 1, 1939, the start of WWII and the invasion of Poland, in order to link the order with the war. They were judged as “useless eaters” having “life unworthy of life.” “As the fanatical Dr. Pfannuller in the Nazi program put it: ‘The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feebleminded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum.’” (The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton) Using the records collected earlier, 70,273 patients in mental hospitals were exterminated in the program.

In order to expedite the execution of so many people in such a short period of time, the German authorities invented fake shower rooms for the administration of carbon monoxide to kill a groups of compliant and unsuspecting patients. When the program was dismantled, many of the psychiatrists and other workers were transferred to the concentration camps where they continued to refine this “efficient” method of mass execution.

Gas Chamber at Auschwitz- US Holocaust Memorial Museum

There were German psychiatrists and doctors whose job it was to make up medical reasons to put on the death certificates of these murdered patients, because the Nazis knew it would not be popular and they loved orderly paperwork. After families began noticing the link between having their loved one transferred to a new facility, then getting a death notice shortly afterward, protests began, including by Catholic and Protestant churches.

As a result, the formal T4 executions were ended in August 1941, but the killing didn’t stop for psychiatric patients, it just changed form. Institutionalized patients were divided into two groups and given two different diets. Those who could work for the state were given a diet with minimal calories and those who could not were given starvation diets. And starve they did. In the end, 200,000 to 275,000 patients with schizophrenia were eliminated. That was estimated as 70 – 100% of the schizophrenic population in Germany and was expected to reduce or eliminate transmission of the disease to the next generation.

But the evil intentions of the Nazis failed in this as well. Yes, after the war there was a very low incidence of schizophrenia because the individuals from that generation had been killed, but in the succeeding generation, there was an INCREASED incidence of schizophrenia in the population relative to other countries and the previous historical rate.

How can that be? Well it turns out that schizophrenia arises from a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Rather than a single recessive gene causing the disease, there are hundreds, or even thousands, of genes that slightly increase susceptibility to the disease, and these genes are widely distributed within the population. So although there is an increased risk of someone being diagnosed with schizophrenia if they have a relative with the disease, the risk is still pretty low. Even for identical twins, with identical genes, the chances of the second twin getting the disease if the first one has it, is only ~50%. So it would have been impossible for the Nazis, or anyone else for that matter, to eliminate the gene pool that lends susceptibility to schizophrenia.

Psychiatrist Karl Brandt who promoted the T4 campaign has the white lapels- Photo from Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H0422-0502-001 / CC-BY-SA 3.0,

Also, if you consider environmental factors, things were pretty grim for the German populace after WWII. There was famine, disease and widespread poverty, as well as the humilation of a second defeat in war. That is the most likely reason more individuals with potentially susceptible gene combinations were affected in utero and during their life experiences to develop schizophrenia. Thankfully, after the war and the atrocities of the Nazis came to light, eugenics was abandoned by the Western World. The hubris of these scientists and psychiatrists led to immense evil because they forgot their humanity and did not have the humility to understand they could be wrong, and they were.

Donna Barten is a novelist and scientist working on her second book Imprint and Inheritance.

Creativity and Mental Health Challenges

July 13, 2023July 13, 2023donnabarten Leave a comment

Many people know that Vincent Van Gogh was institutionalized during much of his creative lifetime and that he painted the famous Starry Night at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. He cut off his ear after an argument with Gaugin and eventually committed suicide. Other famous artists have also struggled with mental health issues, which is no surprise because some of the best art derives from the pain in our lives.

Here are some paintings I saw on exhibit at the Museum Dr. Guislan in Ghent, Belgium. Traveling with me can be a little unusual, as not everyone wants to see a museum dedicated to the history of mental health care. Thankfully, my husband was game and he seemed to enjoy it. Anyway, they also exhibit art from those who struggle with mental health issues and I loved so much of it. Push the arrows to see the slide show. There is art from Leo Neervoort, Minke de Fonkert, Livia Dencher, Jikke Van Loon, Ronny Engelen, and Edward Teeuw. I apologize to 3 artists whose names I failed to capture.

Leo Neervoort
SONY DSC
Minke de Fonkert- Monsterhouse
Unknown artist
Unknown artist
Livia Dencher
Jikke Van Loon- Jimmy
Ronny Engelen
Edward Teeuw

Schizophrenia is the form of illness we most associate with the older terms “mad” and “crazy,” and with the symptoms of psychosis, defined here by Dr. Ken Duckworth at NAMI.

Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person’s thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what isn’t. These disruptions are often experienced as seeing, hearing and believing things that aren’t real or having strange, persistent thoughts, behaviors and emotions. While everyone’s experience is different, most people say psychosis is frightening and confusing.

One would think schizophrenia was a cut and dry diagnosis by now. But, there are several related diseases (including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and many others) that share the symptom of psychosis. Many patients are given different diagnoses by different doctors, even though there is a manual, DSM-5, that tries to clearly lay out criteria for each mental health disorder. That’s why author Esmé Weijun Wang calls them “The Schizophrenias.” The DSM criteria can be helpful, but the National Institutes of Mental Health found they were not as useful for research purposes while investigating causes and treatments. So they are developing their own set of disease criteria based on symptoms and biomarkers. There remains a great deal of controversy over how to define mental health disorders.

Beyond Van Gogh, some of the other famous artists whose names come up most frequently with diagnoses (often post-hoc, and therefore tenuous) of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are Louis Wain (human-like cat paintings) and Edvard Munch (The Scream, The Dance of Life, Self Portrait with a Bottle of Wine). Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of famous F.Scott Fitzgerald and the basis of the character Nicole in Tender Is The Night, produced skillful watercolors while she was institutionalized (Times Square & Washington Square).

Yayoi Kusama, famous for her polka dots, has lived in a mental institution for over 40 years, yet goes to her studio every day to create her avante-guarde work.

How can someone with schizophrenia or a number of other mental health problems create great art? I try to understand what having the disease feels like because Fiana, Colleen’s mother in my novels Imprint and Inheritance and Breathing Water, is schizophrenic. Neuroscientists know that the brains of individuals with mental health disorders function differently and show some wiring differences from other people. Sadly, many are so debilitated that they have a hard time functioning in society and cannot create anything.

But others identify as having high-functioning schizophrenia and can be very creative. Esmé Wijun Wang, a brilliant author writes about managing a productive and fulfilling life in her book, The Collected Schizophrenias. She is married and has many friends. She reflects: “Over the next decade [as she was learning to cope with her disorder], I would occasionally consider the utility of seeing psychosis as an ability: I could improve my mental health by thinking of schizoaffective disorder as a tool to access something useful, as opposed to a terrifying pathology. As Viktor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning, we want our suffering, if it must be endured, to mean something.” Here’s a website celebrating other high-functioning persons with schizophrenia as an inspiration for others.

There are two observations that might help someone with the schizophrenias in the visual arts to be creative in a new way. The first is that early in the disease, it is very common for patients to have enhanced sensory perceptions, especially of vision. Here’s a quote from a patient cited in Surviving Schizophrenia by E. Fuller Torrey, MD.

“Colours seem to be brighter now, almost as if they are luminous painting. I’m not sure if things are solid until I touch them. I seem to be noticing colours more than before … Not only the colour of things fascinate me but all sorts of little things, like markings in the surface, pick up my attention too.”

Also the brains of persons with the schizophrenias have a hard time gating out irrelevant information. We normally do that without thinking. For instance, now that I pay attention, I can notice the sound of an airplane flying in the distance, the wind shifting the leaves and birds and insects making noises through my window. Until I put my attention there, I was oblivious to those things because my brain is able to focus on the task or the conversation at hand. Here is a description from another patient quoted by Torrey.

“Everything seems to grip my attention although I am not particularly interested in anything. I am speaking to you just now, but I can hear noises going on next door and in the corridor. I find it difficult to shut these out, and it makes it more difficult for me to concentrate on what I am saying to you.”

In his 1974 textbook, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Dr. Silvano Arieti described the connection between the disease and art: “The schizophrenic experiences the world in fleeting, fugitive ways that are not only different from the ones he perceived prior to the psychosis, but also from those perceived at different stages of the illness. His world tends to be in constant and turbulent metamorphosis. … Great artists and the mentally ill are shaken by what is terribly absent in our daily reality, and they send us messages of their own search and samples of their own findings. … In some of his works, we hit unsuspected treasures of concentrated meanings.” By the way, Dr. Arieti is the inspiration for Dr. Perkins in Breathing Water.

Dr. Arieti goes on to describe how art therapy can be helpful for patients to express what they cannot say in words, but also to help the psychiatrist in guiding therapy. I appreciate his sentiment that there is value in their perceptions and creations. I also love that the scientific journal Schizophrenia Bulletin uses art from patients on its covers.

Bryan Charnley was an artist struggling with schizophrenia who wanted to relate to others how he experienced his disease. He produced a series of Self Portraits and Bondage Head paintings that conveyed his interpretations. Unfortunately, his pain and delusions became so great that he committed suicide. His art, his accompanying explanations and his life emphasize how difficult it is to live with the disease. A book, Bryan Charnley: Art and Adversity, gives even more paintings and descriptions of his life and work.

Paintings in the Wellcome Collection, used by permission of the family

About 1% of any population has schizophrenia and the numbers are even higher for bipolar disorder at ~ 2.6%. In the next blog article, we’ll see what happened when Hitler and his henchmen tried to engineer mental illness out of the German population.

Donna Barten is a novelist and scientist working on her second book Imprint and Inheritance.

The Canine-Human Success Story

January 12, 2022donnabarten 3 Comments

Dogs ARE human’s best friend

Jocco (standard poodle), Henry (Vizsla) and the author

Genetic success is defined by numbers and dogs are a huge genetic success story. World-wide population estimates of dogs range from 700 million to 1 billion, usually listed behind the most populous large mammalian species of humans (7.8 billion- 2020), followed by cows, and sheep. For cat lovers, there are about 400 million worldwide, so they are also doing quite well spreading their genetic material around the globe. Dogs’ lives are so intertwined with humans that they are the only mammalian species besides rodents who live everywhere humans do. You will find dogs from the Arctic to deserts to equatorial jungles.

Wolves and dogs derived from a common ancestor and so are close canine cousins. So close, in fact, that interbreeding is possible.

Although dogs and wolves share 99.8% of their genes, wolves are an endangered species- often feared and hunted by humans, while dogs are welcomed into human homes, often to snuggle with our babies.

Photo credits: “Wolf 2” by Fremlin is licensed under CC BY 2.0 and “Dog meet baby” by Lawrence

The hallmark characteristic of dogs are their adaptability, both physically and behaviorally. There are about 350 dog breeds and innumerable mixed-breeds creating even more morphological variation. This high level of physical variation is not observed in other species and there is one theory that little bits of DNA (short interspersed nuclear elements or SINES) can more easily jump around in the dog genome to modify gene expression.

Just look at the variation in size, coat color, shape of nose, ears, body, head observed in this montage.

Dog Breed Composite: Photo Credits below.

Not all dogs live as pets. Estimates range from 20% of the canine population (Bern) to about half. The US has the highest numbers of pet dogs, at 38% of households. There are statistics out there because pet products are big business! Yet the majority of dogs are village dogs who live on the edges of human activity, eating handouts, scraps, and garbage (Bern). Now I understand why people from some cultures consider it filthy to have a dog inside a home.

The majority of dogs worldwide live as village or street dogs

Left: “Street dogs, Udaipur” by Dey

Right: street dog eating trash by Hanumann

According to Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist who images the brains of awake dogs, “Dogs are one of the few [species] that can learn from other species. Herding dogs, for example, learn by observing sheep and cattle. And all dogs learn by observing humans and other members of their households, just like Callie [his dog] learned how to open doors.” The success of dogs, even village dogs, depends in part on their uncanny ability to tune into the behavior of humans.

But if dogs and wolves are so similar genetically, are they really that different in temperament with humans? In a special study performed at the Dept. of Ethology, Eotvos University in Hungary, wolf cubs and dog puppies were individually hand-raised in a home environment with constant human contact from 3 – 24 weeks of age and their behaviors measured as they grew. At first the wolf cubs didn’t seem different from the puppies, but within weeks, the wolves paid little attention to the humans, seldom made eye-contact, and eventually became so wild they could no longer be kept in the volunteers’ homes. Further study of the two populations showed that although wolves could be taught to walk on a leash, sit for a treat and come when called, they do not cue into human behavior the same way puppies do. There is something unique about the dog-human relationship.

Dogs were domesticated somewhere from 15,000 to 40,000 years ago. That would place it before the beginning of agriculture and the domestication of other animals (James Serpell). There are two hotly debated theories of dog domestication. One is the commensal scavenger hypothesis, basically the idea that dogs self-domesticated by hanging out on the fringes of human gatherings, and the other, the cross-species adoption hypothesis, is that humans sought out various baby animals as pets and the precursor to wolves and dogs was the most successful species to affiliate with them beyond the juvenile stage.

Human-dog interactions show up in pre-historic cave paintings and other art, including this collection from Saudi Arabia described by archeologist, Maria Guagnin.

Modern day Canaan dogs from the Arabian Peninsula (left) and rock art from Shuwaymis (right). Dogs aiding in hunting activities, with two who appear to be on leash (below).

Dog domestication may have happened first in Europe, Asia and/or the Middle East, but we do know that when Europeans first colonized the Americas and brought their dogs with them, there were already dogs present. This interesting video (25 min) describes how Native American cultures already had breeds specialized for different purposes, such as hunting, herding, and pack dogs. Salish wool dogs with a fuzzy white coat were sheared in the spring to create special blankets and the Chihuahua in Mexico were believed to have healing skills by sitting on areas of human ailment. Dogs moved into the Americas pre-European contact in at least two waves of migration from Asia along with human migration. Unfortunately, European disease had a devastating effect on these native dog populations as well on the humans, and most of the original pre-contact breeds are now gone, although Alaskan malamutes and chihuahuas are survivors. Even so, with much interbreeding, most of the pre-contact dog DNA, as determined from early canine remains, has been replaced with European canine DNA.

Dogs and humans have an amazingly intertwined history, each benefitting the other, so that many of us would find it hard to live happily without them. I am certainly one of them.

Key reference: How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist And His Adopted Dog Decode The Canine Brain by Gregory Berns

Donna Barten is a novelist and scientist awaiting publication of her debut novel, Breathing Water.

Dog Breed Composite Photo Credits. Photos by Donna Barten unless otherwise noted. Golden Retriever (Rusty) by Craig Cox; Great Dane, The Walk to Save Great Danes by Warchild; Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy by Judith MacMunn; Boxer (Eli) by Jaylene Piraino; Miniature Poodle (Max) by Tom Callard; Mixed breed reservation dog by Michael Barten; Bulldog (Nikko) by sabianmaggy; Shiba Inu (Japanese Dog Breed) by marcoverch; Cocker Spaniel (Tucker); Whippet – Dallas Dog Shows by M.P.N.texan; Yorkshire Terrier (Tucker); White Boxer (Bosco) by Jaylene Piraino; Dachshund Dog Breed by shamaasa; Chihuahua– La Main – The Main – Chiwawa by Humanoide; Afghan Hound by tarentula_in; Sweet lil’ hunting dog (Black lab) by m01229; Cavalier King Charles Spaniel (Berklee); Irish Setter (Bonnie); Boston Bull Terrier (Franklin) by Jaylene Piraino; Biggelow the SharPei – regal by Biggelow Bear Bags 2

What Makes a Fox Tame?

September 6, 2021October 2, 2021donnabarten Leave a comment

Thanks to my friend Nora, another dog lover, for recommending the 2017 book: How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut. The book chronicles an extended experiment done in Siberia started in the 1950s by two amazing geneticists, Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut. They risked their careers and lives during a time of Soviet animosity toward geneticists, using foxes to probe basic questions about how animals become domesticated. I was fascinated by their work and wanted to check out what has happened since publication of the book.

Creating Tame Foxes

Dmitri noticed that domesticated animals shared certain, mostly juvenile, features not common in adult wild animals: floppy ears, curly tails, more rounded facial features, and coat colors with patches, blazes and spots. No wonder I call my dogs babies. But not all animals can be domesticated. Although the zebra can sometimes be bred to a horse, showing a close genetic link, European colonists in Africa were never able to domesticate the zebra, which, unlike horses, were resistant to diseases transmitted by the tsetse fly.

Dmitri Belyaev with domesticated foxes in March 1984. Photo Credit: Sputnik, via Alamy

The Soviet Union was breeding foxes in farms for the lucrative fur market. Red foxes had already been bred into a more prized silver coat color by Canadians and the Soviets developed their own colonies from these animals. They were kept single-housed in cages and were particularly aggressive. The caretakers needed to wear thick gloves, even while providing food, as the foxes snarled and snapped. A miserable life for the animals and not very nice for the caretakers either.

The experiment was simple. Look for the least aggressive foxes during this normal handling, breed them together and then keep breeding the animals that were calmest around humans. Like with zebras, the experiment could fail, but they had hope because domesticated dogs and wolves both originated from a common ancestor. There was a chance it would work and it could be justified with the Soviet authorities economically to allow the project to proceed.

Within 3 generations they began to see significantly calmer behavior around humans, and within 4 generations they had a lone pup, Ember, who wagged his tail for them. It took several litters for this behavior to show up in Ember’s pups, leading to a line of foxes with tail wagging propensities. By the 5^th generation, they were finding pups who wanted to nuzzle up to the humans and would lay on their backs for a tummy rub. In each generation, larger percentages of the pups would display these behaviors, and by generation 8, some of their tails began to curl. Their natural puppy playfulness lasted longer than the normal foxes and some even began to maintain non-aggressive eye contact with their caretakers. In the 10^th generation, Mechta became the first fox to keep floppy ears into adulthood. These more juvenile physical features, in different combinations in different individuals, were showing up based on selection only for behavior. Vocalizations similar to human laughter also began to appear and the foxes were able to respond to human training and hand signals like dogs. Amazing!

Fox bred for dog-like behavior towards humans.

Photo Credit: Jennifer Johnson, Darya Shepeleva, and Anna Kukekova

What Caused the Apparent Domestication?

The scientists wanted to understand how these changes were happening and compared the tame colony of foxes with another group purposely selected for aggressive behavior toward humans. It was hard to find caretakers willing to care for this aggressive group, but they have been invaluable for comparison. These carefully bred colonies of foxes were almost lost in the break-up of the Soviet Union and subsequent changes, but support from the world wide scientific and humanitarian community helped save the foxes. It’s unclear if these Russian foxes can be adopted into the US, but it looks like there have been importation issues and scams. Beware that they are still much wilder than a domesticated dog and can be quite a handful to care for…. super high energy, dig a lot and have a propensity to mark with very strong smelling urine.

There is scientific controversy over whether this population of foxes was really a good example of domestication because tame foxes also appear to have existed in the original Canadian colony of silver foxes, but in my mind that does not diminish the value of having those two distinct populations of foxes for comparison. They behave consistently on opposite ends of the spectrum of behavior toward humans.

Lyudmila and her colleagues had to make good guesses about what might be different between the tame and aggressive foxes and then measure those things one at a time. That was the state of science at the time and later studies verified those results. There was not too much surprise that the levels of stress hormones were higher in the aggressive than the tame foxes. It was also consistent to find higher levels of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine in regions of the tame fox brains as they are often called “happy” and “feel good” neurotransmitters. Higher levels of glutamate, the primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, and molecules involved in its signaling were observed in the aggressive lines. Fetal development and even hippocampal regenerative capacity (associated with a more supple memory forming apparatus), were found to have been altered in the tame animals. These may explain how some of the physical and behavioral traits were linked.

It’s Complicated

More recently, scientists prefer to compare differences between populations at the genetic and transcript levels without making guesses. This unbiased approach allows us to learn about changes we may not anticipate, and there are always surprises in such studies. What does that all mean? Well genes are encoded in our DNA blueprint and are the same all over the body for an individual. Transcripts, or the messenger RNA transcribed from the genes, are the subset of genes actually used in each tissue and so vary with each tissue of the body. It allows each cell type and tissue to have a different structure and function in the body, otherwise we would just be one big blob. Scientists can compare either the entire genome or the transcriptome to look for differences.

With these methods, 70 genes and 159 splice variants were different between the tame and aggressive lines over three brain regions. Look at the heat map below of the transcriptome from the hypothalamus of a dozen each tame vs. aggressive foxes shown vertically. Horizontally, the amount of expression for one gene is shown as an intensity between very low (bright red), medium (black) and very high (bright green). I think they’re pretty and hold a lot of information if you unfocus your eyes a bit and look at the overall color schemes on each side of the square.

From: *Genes Brain Behav*. 2020;19(1):e12614. doi:10.1111/gbb.12614

Computer algorithms search the voluminous data for patterns while comparing each mRNA transcript between the two groups. Overall you can see some transcripts are higher (green) or lower (red) in expression depending on whether the animal was tame or aggressive, but it isn’t consistent with every individual in the group. Looks complicated, yes, and that’s my point. Lots of things are happening- some changes may be causing many other changes in a cascade and there is not just one magic switch for it all. Within those changes, patterns in different pathways were evaluated and found in the systems related to development, differentiation, and, surprisingly, immunity.

There is much work to be done and new publications continue to pour out from analyzing these animals and what may have led them to be able to be sociable with people. Although tame foxes are not the same as dogs and there are bound to be some differences, this is a fascinating set of experiments, now going on for over 60 years, due to the bravery and diligence of a few brave scientists in Siberia.

Being a Scientist and a Novelist … Isn’t That an Oxymoron?

April 6, 2021October 2, 2021donnabarten 2 Comments

Cultural Division of the Sciences and Humanities

We live in a culture where facility with science, facts and numbers are considered left brain activities and creative endeavors like fiction, painting and music are considered right brain activities. Individuals are supposedly trapped into primarily using one half their brain or the other. Further emphasizing this division, college tracks are separated into the humanities or science & technology, with only a smattering of courses allowed on the other side of the aisle. In 1959, C.P Snow—a chemist and novelist—called on the British to stop separating the two cultures and to allow greater crossover. He called the humanists in his country “pessimistic Luddites” and saw the bright future of prosperity and cold war superiority in science—but a humanized science. His short book on the topic became hot in the US as we ramped up our own science and technology for the space age. 1

Left Brain- Right Brain Theories and Handedness

In the 1980s, left brain- right brain theory was popularized and remains so to this day. You can take quizzes online to find out your brain dominance and personality. These theories started with the over-interpretation of a case study involving an epilepsy patient whose corpus callosum was surgically severed to control his seizures. The corpus callosum, Latin for tough body, is a fiber network joining the right and left hemispheres. This surgery helped the patient’s seizures, but messed up his ability to process information and move in a side-specific manner. 2

This myth of right- and left brained people is perpetuated by many factors, including our observations of right- and left-handed people. Lefties comprise only ~10% of the population (and have been since prehistoric days) and are expected to be more creative. Based on that, you would guess that a room full of scientists would all be right-handed and if they were all sitting at tables taking notes, no one would have to worry about bumping elbows. It was after an elbow bump during a meeting tightly packed around a table that I first realized at least half my molecular biology, pharmacology and chemistry colleagues were left-handed. I felt a little left out as a rightie, as if maybe I had a creativity disadvantage. But scientific study does not support this common stereotype 3, and instead some hypothesize left-handedness remains in the gene pool due to an association with competitiveness. 4

The author as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (left) and more recently at her writing desk (below)

Myths and Truths on Left-Right Brain Use

Scientific inquiry over the last 20 years has enabled us to measure the size and activity of different brain regions in living humans and even dogs. Imaging can be done in people who are doing nothing in particular (the default brain network) and while they are engaged in specific tasks. These types of studies have verified that righties have most of their motor functions controlled by the left motor cortex, while lefties have more controlled by the right motor cortex, but with not as much of a preference as righties. That makes it easier for lefties to become ambidextrous and cope with a broken left arm. 5

There are many functions that tend to be more predominant on one side of the brain verses the other (lateralization) and it’s an expanding area of research. More of the functions associated with language are found on the left, while attention and non-verbal communication is more focused in the right brain. But imaging has allowed us to see that for individuals, we are not predominantly using only one side of our brains verses the other outside of our motor functions. 6

The Gorgeous Corpus Callosum

I want to put in a plug here for the beautiful brain and the amazing corpus callosum. It is the largest white matter tract in the brain and allows for exquisite coordination of left and right hemispheres. It’s only found in placental mammals and the complex lateralization and interplay between hemispheres in humans is not found in mouse brains, the species I most studied. The corpus callosum and its complexity are part of what makes us human.

Corpus Callosum in Red
Images are generated by Life Science Databases(LSDB)., CC BY-SA 2.1 JP

Science-Trained Authors

So now that we’ve got the handedness and left-right brain story a little bit explained, what about a scientist becoming a successful novelist? Most people would think the link with science fiction was pretty reasonable. Andy Weir, author of The Martian, is a computer programmer who we can put into the analytical scientist bucket. But many would be surprised at the inclusion of Vladimir Nabokov and Lewis Carroll on the list. Contemporary biologist/authors of other types of fiction include:

Diana Gabaldon- the Outlander series
Barbara Kingsolver- The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, The Lacuna
Delia Owens- Where the Crawdads Sing
Lisa Genova- Still Alice, Inside the O’Briens, Love Anthony
Brandon Taylor- Real Life

Many physicians and psychologists are also successful authors and there’s even a website at NYU that helps you find not only medically oriented authors but also good literature including science. https://medhum.med.nyu.edu/ Think about Anton Checkov, William Carlos Williams, W. Somerset Maugham, Abe Kobo and Percy Walker in an earlier era. More modern physician/authors include:

Kaled Hosseini- The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns
Abraham Verghese- Cutting for Stone
Chris Cleve– Little Bee, Everyone Brave is Forgiven, Incendiary
Irvin Yalom- Lying on the Couch, When Nietzsche Wept, The Spinoza Problem
Carol Cassella- Oxygen, Healer, Gemini
Perri Klass- The Mercy Rule, The Mystery of Breathing
Melissa Yuan-Innes/ Melissa Yi- Code Blues, Life Support, Terminally Ill
Tess Gerritsen- Girl Missing, The Apprentice, The Bone Garden

The works of these authors span genres and although many include significant components of their scientific/medical expertise, many do not. You’ll find little bits in my novels, and I hope to join the ranks of these distinguished published authors soon.