I always thought dogs had feelings. Turns out I was right. According to Daily Mail,
New research from Emory University finds that dogs have emotions just like people do. To find this, researchers trained a dog to sit completely still in an MRI brain scanning machine so that researchers could learn about the dog’s emotions. They found that dogs have a similar brain structure in a key area of the brain– the caudate nucleus. The caudate nucleus in humans plays a role in the anticipation of things we enjoy, and researchers found that dogs had increased activity in that part of their brain in response to hand signals indicating food. Additionally, the caudate part of the dog’s brain was activated in response to the smell of familiar humans, and in preliminary tests it was activated after an owner returned to the room after stepping out momentarily. Researchers say this may be a sign of canine emotions, which could mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child.
That is pretty cool.
