Your Best Friend Also Has A Conscience
If you share your life with one or more dogs, you have surely asked yourself this question at some time: What is behind the looks of your best friend? How can you understand so many things? Are they really intelligent beings … do they have a conscience?
For the first time neuroscientists have addressed these questions trying to uncover some of the questions that have historically always been on the lips of generations and generations of dog lovers.
To do this, they have subjected a group of them to an FMRI scan to observe the behavior of the brain, as is normally done with humans. And the results have been very revealing.
Your best friend has a conscience similar to that of a child.
Before knowing what the conclusions of the neuroscientist Gregory Burns were, let’s talk a little about what consciousness is. How can we describe it? Consciousness is that knowledge we have about ourselves and the world around us, formed in turn by a sense of morality : knowing what is right and what is wrong, knowing the world of which we are a part while integrating a sense of ethics.
Well, once this is clarified, we will advance that Dr. Burns’ results revealed that dogs have a consciousness comparable to that of a child. Your brain is very rich in dopamine receptors, neurotransmitters that work at the level of the caudate and the brain stem as in humans.
In people, the caudate implies that we can anticipate the things that happen around us: knowing that the company is pleasant, that we need affection to be happy, that certain situations can cause discomfort in others and also in ourselves …
That is, dogs have a fine-tuned cognitive connection where they recognize that certain situations are linked to certain emotions. And even more, that they are not only able to recognize their own emotions, but also those of others. Hasn’t it ever happened to you that, being sad, you have felt the closeness and even the concern of your pet?
But the brain structure of the caudate is not the only structure similar to the human one: many other parts of the brain are activated in the same way as ours: dogs feel, dream, reason, fear loneliness and are capable of elaborating simple programs to achieve basic goals.
Dogs are emotionally attached to us
Dogs are emotionally attached to us far beyond the practical or instrumental sense, and not just the mere sense of food. Let’s think about those cases where lost dogs manage to find their owners despite the fact that they have moved from town or city.
Scientists speak of a bond, of a union that continues to be established in them even beyond the death of their owners, where sadness in the face of this loss is usually clearly visible in our animals.
The ability to experience positive emotions such as love and attachment shows us that dogs have a level of wisdom very comparable to that of a human child. So if you doubted the intelligence of your best friend, now you know many of the behaviors that he has and why.
All of this makes us think many things: that they may understand a lot more things than we think, that they are capable of giving us emotional support without words as sincere as that of any of our friends, and that, believe it or not, they suffer. just like us when they are rejected or abandoned.
