All great friendships start with a paw-shake. Reach out. Dogs are the best. Everyone thinks they own the best dog and the fact is no one is wrong. I have two and can own as many as possible. We have always loved and adored these amazing creatures that are way more lovable than we think. A dog is the only creature on this earth that would love you more than he loves himself.
Dogs do speak but only to those who know how to listen. The new and absolutely amazing thing to note here is that dogs too understand what we say to them and exactly how we say it. Don’t believe us? A recent research of human behavior towards dogs and their expressions and responses have proves that dogs understand what the owner is saying or is trying to say. They discovered that dogs’ brains process language in a similar way to humans, with the right side dealing with emotion and the left processing meaning.
Lead researcher Dr Attila Andics, of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, said, “It was surprising that dogs, like people, have a clear left hemisphere dominance for processing meaningful words and that they combine word meaning and intonation to arrive at a unified representation of meaning,” Andics said.
“What makes dogs special is that they pay attention to human social signals, including speech,” he added. “This study is the first step to understanding how dogs interpret human speech, and these results can also help to make communication and cooperation between dogs and humans even more efficient.”
“During speech processing, there is a well-known distribution of labour in the human brain. It is mainly the left hemisphere’s job to process word meaning, and the right hemisphere’s job to process intonation. The human brain not only separately analyses what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning. Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms.”
“It shows that for dogs, a nice praise can very well work as a reward, but it works best if both words and intonation match,” Dr Andics said.
“So dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant. This is very similar to what human brains do,” he added. A statement about the study said the researchers believed their results could “help to make communication and cooperation between dogs and humans even more efficient”.
So people, be the person your dog thinks you are J While I leave you here to wonder what a beautiful world it would be if people had hearts like dog’s, excuse me as I need to go and cuddle with them for a while…
“Good boy! Who’s such a good boy? You’re a good boy!”
