Gregory BernsReseñas

A lot of great ideas in this book and possible tales to go with them, but they are never realized. I felt like each chapter led you down a path that ultimately never went anywhere but onto the next chapter. Maybe this is all because the science is only beginning and we have yet to see what it’s really like to be a dog, if we ever really can. The last two chapters were great and put us where we belong on the earth sharing limited resources with all the other species in such a way that our extinction is very likely.

I don’t understand the deeper intricacies of neuroscience, but I am fascinated by it, and as an animal lover, I found this book to be particularly interesting.
I read a few reviews of people who didn’t finish because they thought he lost focus or didn’t deliver what they were hoping to get, based on the title. I wonder if the author had put the last chapter of the book, Dog Lab, at the beginning of the book, if it would have made a difference in how many people stuck with it until the end. I thought the chapter went a long way toward putting his studies, especially the Dog Project, in context, and it very clearly explained his motivation for starting the project. Except for his projections for human evolution at the very end, which struck me as pretty weird, I was on the same page as the author with his views of how we should approach our attitudes about and interactions with animals.
He alternated between being technical beyond my understanding and using a friendlier narrative style that at times felt a little indulgent. If I glossed over some of the details, I found it fairly easy to follow.
I don’t know how much was proved through these experiments, but I appreciate the motivation behind them and the careful standards they set for them.
Overall, a fascinating read for animal lovers, and I recommend reading the last chapter first.

I have read several other books about dog thinking and dog minds that just didn't ring true my own experience. How Dogs Love Us by Gregory Berns is not in the doesn't ring true category. This book tells about a real study where MRIs were used to scan dogs brains while the dogs were awake and alert. Some of the most interesting parts of the book were the chapters telling how the dogs were trained to go into the MRI and sit still for up to 30 seconds. This study was not the first were dogs brains were scanned but it was the first time dogs were awake and cooperating with their humans. The author mentioned that dogs pay more attention to us than we do to them. Many dog owners are convinced that their dogs understand them. This book confirms that it could be true.

Loved it

I absolutely loved reading this book. I'm a animal person discovering how they think would be amazing... I recommend this book to any science and animal lover

Berns position is that an iconoclast sees things differently from the rest of human nature, controls his fear of failure and fear of the unknown, and has enough social savvy to sell his idea to the world. Interesting enough and the discussions of specific iconoclasts was interesting with two notable exceptions- the chapter on financial wizards and the ever so boring chapter on commercial space travel. There were a couple of real tick offs- one where Berns maintains that after the accumulation of a certain amount of riches, the brains of the uberrich do not really want more money. Has he visited the US lately? That almost made me give it one star, really. Then at the end of the book is an appendix with an "iconoclast's pharmacopoeia" in which he (neuroscientist that he may be) lists all the psychoactive drugs that may lead the ordinary Joe to iconoclast status. Of course, he does warn that most of these are extremely dangerous, if not illegal. Why? Is he an idiot? So, although some of the info was mildly interesting, some of the author's opinions (I am sure he would say thay are backed by scientific research) are bunk. I started off interested and ended up ticked off.

Gregory Berns loves dogs. So does the rest of his family, but he's the neuroscientist, He decided he wanted to know if his dogs really loved him, and if he could determine how and why.

This led inevitably to training the newest addition to their family of six (two adults, two daughters, two dogs) a terrier mix they named Callie, to enter an MRI, assume a scannable position, and remain motionless for long enough intervals for useful brain scans.

Just getting the necessary permissions and approvals to bring pet dogs, rather than "purpose-bred dogs," mostly beagles bred only to be lab animals, into the lab or even onto Emory University property, was a challenge. There are good reasons, for many kinds of research, for using purpose-bred animals, including dogs. It's not the best choice in every case, though, and for at least thirty years the trend has been to eliminate research animals altogether whenever there are alternatives that give good results. Real alternatives to animal haven't yet reached to point of making lab animals completely unnecessary, but the need has been dramatically reduced over the course of my working life.

And while this particular research project necessarily involved real dogs, there was no need at all for them to be purpose-bred lab animals. Pet dogs calm enough to be trained for the MRI tests were arguably a better choice, because they would have a more normal relationship with humans, and that's what "the dog project" was all about.

So Berns kept pushing, and inventing work-arounds for the demands of the research office and the legal office, and got his project approved.

Then came figuring out to train his own terrier mix, Callie, and a border collie, McKenzie, to accept the MRI, the noise of the MRI, and keeping still in the correct position for the scans. All this just to get to the proof of concept stage, proving they could do useful MRI scans on animals as different from the normal MRI subjects (humans and other primates) as dogs are.

And it's unexpectedly fun to read this section, before they ever get to the tests they want--can they tell from brain scans whether dogs actually like humans, and not just the fact that we're a reliable source of food and toys?

It's a great account, further enlivened by Callie herself, the Berns family, and the other Berns dogs, both Lyra the Golden retriever they had at the same time as Callie, and the pugs, especially Newton, who preceded them. And yet, that leads to the one part of this book that bothered me.

The other standout personality here besides Callie, is Newton. Pugs are generally happy, affectionate personalities, really great companion dogs. Except, of course, for the fact that their skulls are so short and their faces so flat that often they can't breathe properly. The snorting, the snuffling, the snoring, that many people, including Gregory Berns, think is so cute, is in fact a sign of a dog who is suffering from not breathing properly. It's not fun to breathe that badly. It's exhausting, compromises sleep, is at best uncomfortable and often painful.

This is something that can be avoided, or at least greatly minimized, by being really careful in selecting a breeder to get your dog from. But the Berns family prefers to adopt from shelters, which is good and much to be encouraged--but if you adopt pug or another brachcephalic dog from a shelter or rescue, and you have, like the Berns family, an at least upper middle class income, you should be asking your vet, first thing, whether a soft palette resection is right for your dog. If your dog is one of the dogs of this type that has significant difficulty breathing, and you have the resources, you should be talking to your vet about whether your dog can be helped. It may not be possible in every case, but when, like Gregory Berns, you know that "cute" snorting and snoring is in fact very hard on your dog, you ought to at least talk to your vet about possible help for the problem. And yet Berns, who clearly really loves his dogs, and who tells us that Newton couldn't breathe properly and it was a problem for the poor dog, never mentions talking to the vet about it.

I really do feel that even if Newton couldn't be helped, Berns could have devoted a paragraph to telling people that the snorting and snoring isn't cute, and that if they have the means they should at least talk to their vet about it. He doesn't.

And yet.

This is a really good book about research that any dog lover will love.

I should, in fairness, warn those who need to know that yes, dogs, including Newton and later Lyra, the Golden retriever, do die during the book. But these are the deaths at a reasonable age of dogs who were loved and happy members of their family. They're not awful tragedies that come out of nowhere to smack you in the face for the sake of extracting emotion from you.

And yes, you will love the research and its results.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

This book will be a disappointment for anyone who wants a literal answer to the title (welcome to the non-magical world - it's not gonna happen). But it's the beginning of an empirical argument against the idea that dogs are stimulus-response machines who can't have complex emotions like love or sadness. The author is just as much a dog-person as a scientist and along with the (mercifully simplified) science he also tells a lovely story about his dogs and family. And of course, any book with the words 'love' and 'dogs' in the title has to have its weepy moment.

Thinking Like Animals = Better Communications?

What It’s Like To Be A Dog is all over the place. Gregory Berns is passionate about dogs, but his life is neurological investigation. He uses various flavors of MRI to examine and record the brains of all kinds of animals. He has gone to the point of obtaining the pickled brains of extinct animals to scan and analyze. Several chapters deal with his adventures in bureaucracy, trying to borrow the brains and figure out how they worked. Far more than dogs, that is what the book is about.

He does keep coming back to dogs, though. Berns and company devised numerous experiments to see if dogs could pass tests that two year old humans ace. Importantly, this is not to prove humans are smarter, but to see how much dogs process their own observations. He patiently trains the dogs to enter and stay in MRI machines, despite the enclosure and the racket, and to follow directions. It means endless repetitions in dry runs. The idea is to find out if dogs can transfer their attention as directed. Or what has priority: praise or food? In that way, we might understand how dogs think.

Dogs don’t think in labels like humans do. Humans have a name for every little thing. Dogs don’t care. For example, given a choice to pick out a close substitute for a specifically named toy, a dog will look at shape last. It will first look for substitutes of the same general size, and then of the same texture, the very opposite of what humans would do. That should color how we think about communicating with dogs.

Dogs are not about things; they are about actions. They will follow instructions to do things all day long. But telling them to select an object by name shows most unsatisfactory results. Dogs expect/hope that commands are for actions. If we can change our approach to recognize that bias, perhaps we can communicate better with them, Berns says.

There are a bunch of fascinating sidelights, too. Dolphins, another subject of brains scans, process sound over 100 times faster than humans. Sound travels at 3355 mph under water (Sound travels at 768 mph in the air), so fast that it is near useless to use slow, low level sounds which echo back all at the same time. Dolphins instead employ high pitched sounds in the range of 100 KHz. Meanwhile, humans can only hear up to about 20 Khz, and dogs 40 Khz. Dolphins hear through their jaws, and can distinguish objects a fraction of a millimeter that way. They are far more accurate hearing than humans are with sight.

The book ends in a totally unexpected way, totally unconnected to the title. Berns is a big animal rights activist. He has the greatest respect for them, and pushes to end the suffering humans inflict on them. He goes on for pages about Dog Lab in med school and how he regrets it. He also sees the decline and fall of humans, as DNA editing will allow custom humans to be produced at will.

This is a wild conclusion to a book that already has relatively little to do with the title. It shows Berns to be a multifaceted scientist with a lot of heart. But it’s not really about what it’s like to be a dog.

David Wineberg

Fascinating description of how neuroscientists first began to examine the way that dogs think and interact with humans. Both the methodology and the results kept my attention and fed my curiosity. The research also highlights how little we know about the level of sentience of the life around us. Really enjoyed this one despite it sometimes being a bit technical. Worth the time.

The premise of this book is simple, and can be summarised as an equation: satisfaction = novelty challenge.

Berns is an excellent storyteller, and he kept me engrossed throughout. The only thing that frustrated me was that Berns never really proves his premise, not from a scientific perspective anyway. While reading, you continuously feel like he's on the verge of doing something that goes in the right direction, then he veers away.

It would have been a three-star book, except for the chapter on Iceland. That nearly made it a five-star book. I recommend it.

I'm enjoying the science. How the brain process info is always interesting, but how the brain processing you vision affects your decision making and your ability to be open minded, creative, and think outside the box...wow.

Like most of you, I often wonder what my dogs are thinking. They are mysteries to me. I talk to them like people because I like to pretend they understand what I'm saying. Sometimes I think they might.

Gregory Berns and his team did some interesting research into the inner workings of a dog's brain. Largely anecdotal, those looking for hard science, data, and graphs should look up the papers he's published. For me, the layman's terms and personal stories of his family and dogs made the book a win. I find it amazing that they could train dogs to lie still in an MRI when I can't even get my dogs to stop bickering over the food dishes. Dogs, seriously, they are exactly the same. Knock it off.

I found the various experiments interesting and love how they are dedicated to better understanding dogs, the brain, and how emotions may or may not be universal. I know my dogs love me--I certainly didn't need a brain scan to see it--but I still think it would be cool to watch.

Dog lovers will enjoy it. If you aren't a dog person, you probably wouldn't pick it up to begin with.

A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain

Loved it

I absolutely loved reading this book. I'm a animal person discovering how they think would be amazing... I recommend this book to any science and animal lover

I enjoyed learning what Gregory Berns discovered with his research about the canine brain. I found myself referring to many things my dogs do or how they communicate with me while reading this book which was pretty cool! I would recommend this book to any dog lover. :-)

The subtitle of this book is ‘A Neuroscientist and his dog decode the canine brain’. Gregory Berns – the neuroscientist in question – has done years of MRI work to help understand how the human brain works, but as a dog lover, he wanted to learn how a dog’s brain works. After first determining that such a thing could even be done, he and his team at Emory University came up with methods of doing MRI scans on a canine brain. He leads the reader through the initial idea, right through the various difficulties they had to overcome (for example, from being given the go-ahead to do the experiment in the first place, or training dogs how to lie absolutely still in the MRI scanner.

The two dogs who participate in the experiment are Callie, Berns’ own adopted mix-breed, and McKenzie, the Border Collie owned by a friend of a friend. Berns describes the scientific aspects of the experiment, including how an MRI works and is used, and while the narrative sometimes necessarily becomes quite technical, it was explained simply enough for someone like me – with not the best grasp of scientific concepts – and didn’t lose me or bore me along the way.

Stories about Berns’ family life and his two dogs – as well as Callie, they have a Golden Retriever named Lyra – keep the story bouncing along, and underline the fact that while he is a scientist, he is also a dog lover, with the greatest respect for their happiness and well-being. For that reason, he was determined that the experiment should not be detrimental to the dogs in any way, and that they should be allowed to not participate if that was what they chose.

It’s a fascinating study, and the telling of it is engaging and, for the most part, upbeat. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in this particular branch of science, but also for any dog lovers. Very enjoyable.½

My takeaway: iconoclastic behavior is the result of three factors -- different perception, less fear, and more social intelligence. The appendix describes the variety of drugs (legal and not) that can help.

This is the type of science I can deal with. I am not a science person and therefore must take my information in small doses. This subject interests me and I am interested about how "feelings" like satisfaction can be described as chemical responses in the brain. This books takes you on a journey of experience and investigation. It is full of really smart people. I enjoyed it thoughly.

I first heard about this book on C.C. Chapman's Managing the Grey podcast, and was intrigued. Berns presents us with the biological reasons that some people are capable of thinking "outside the box," so to speak. These are the innovators, the people who find unique solutions to common problems. They are people who are valuable in business and in society.

Berns presents the reader with several case studies to illustrate how people have used this ability. Walt Disney, Ray Kroc, Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry Ford, Jackie Robinson - these are all people the reader will be familiar with. But Berns also features people that many will never have heard of -- Howard Armstrong, the man who first had the idea to broadcast FM signals rather than just AM. Glass artist Dale Chihuly, whose asymmetrical creations have revolutionized glass blowing.Paul Laterbur, who developed the MRI. And many more.

There is a lot of value in this book, if for no other reason than the encouragement that Berns gives to the reader. Unfortunately, Berns often goes into technical discussions of the brain and how it works that will leave some readers numb. If you haven't paid much attention to biology or biochemistry since high school, prepare for a refresher course.

One part of the book that I really thought could have been left out was the appendix, which details the types of drugs that are available to "help" potential iconoclasts to really think outside that box. Berns offers a disclaimer that he does not condone the use of illegal drugs, and he is straightforward with readers concerning the potential problems with various drugs. But I really think that this section (entitled The Iconoclast's Pharmacopeia) is as vestigial as the organ it is named after, and should have been cut out completely.

Seth Godin's 2008 titel is 'Tribes We need you to lead us'. Veelschrijver Godin raakt in dit bijzondere boekje één van de kernen van het sociale element van het moderne internet: de rol van de leider van een gemeenschap. Godin constateert dat leiderschap een kernmerk is, waarvan weinig mensen vinden dat ze het hebben! En het daarom niet naar zich toetrekken.Tegelijkertijd verscheen 'Iconoclast', een boek dat aangeeft dat elke gewone man een leider is. Mits je beschikt over moed, sociale vaardigheden en de juiste perceptie.

Iconoclast (met als ondertitel 'A Neuroscientist reveals how to think differently') van neuroloog Gregory Berns duikt in de hersenen van 'bijzondere' mensen. Een Iconoclast is 'a person who does something that others say can't be done'. Het boek bevat het 'geheugen-DNA' van een leider. En Don Quichot's natuurlijk. Iedereen kent ze. De rolmodellen van de succesvolle man en vrouw die tegen de verwachting in waarmaakt wat niemand voor mogelijk hield. Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford en Pablo Picasso zijn van die rolmodellen. In de loop van de tijd werd op vele manieren gekeken en geanalyseerd naar dit fenomeen. Geluk, achtergrond (lees ook Succes is geen toeval) en omstandigheden. Allemaal verklaringen die buiten ons liggen. Berns verklaart het van binnenuit: vanuit ons brein. Een gebied waar we door juiste kennis en oefening heel veel aan en mee kunnen doen. Een gebied waar de laatste jaren ook veel doorbraken gerealiseerd zijn.

De drie belangrijkste eigenschappen voor een iconoclastische stijl: bekijk zaken vanuit een verrassend perspectief, wees moedig (geef niet (te) snel op), en ontwikkel sociale vaardigheden. De eerste eigenschap wordt veel aangehaald in literatuur over innovatie. Door een probleem op een (extreem) andere manier te bekijken, ontvouwen zich vaak verrassende mogelijkheden. Het is een state-of-mind om dit te (blijven) doen. Berns plaatst in elk hoofdstuk twee beroemdheden tegenover elkaar om zijn punt te bewijzen. Een spannende is Pablo Picasso en Vincent van Gogh. De eerste was bij leven beroemd en rijk. Van Gogh was dat nauwelijks, tot hij erkend werd en handelaren vele miljoenen aan zijn werk verdienden. Pablo was bekend om zijn sociale intelligentie. Gespecificeerd: familiariteit en reputatie. Een iconoclast bouwt aan een diepgaand netwerk en een reputatie op basis van die connecties. Picasso is wat in de theorie van sociale netwerken een 'node' wordt genoemd. De ideeën die een iconoclast heeft, het doel dat hij wil bereiken, is vaak zo buitensporig, dat om zijn doel te bereiken hij medestanders moet verzamelen. Hem rest zelden anders dan netwerken. Stanley Milgram was een iconoclast. Hij formulerde de wet van de 'Six Degrees of Seperation'. Deze regel dat ieder mens zes connecties verwijderd is van alle andere mensen, is de basis van sites als LinkedIn,Hyves, MySpace en Facebook.

Hier de brug naar Tribes (Portfolio 2008) van Seth Godin. Een tribe (gemeenschap) is een groep mensen met een gezamenlijk belang én een manier om te communiceren. Godin onderzoekt waarom gemeenschappen zo slecht aan leiders komen. De meeste mensen zijn volgers, te bang om te leiden. We leven echter in een tijd waarin aan de gewoonste mens gevraagd wordt te leiden. Mensen die bereid zijn veranderingen te starten. Kleine veranderingen doorgaans, maar toch. Dit vereist een leiderschaphouding. Lastig, want veranderen en leiderschap, we hebben geleerd er verre van te blijven.

Maar met de 'iconoclastische' eigenschappen (die hierboven beschreven zijn) en een plan kun je een eind komen. Godin biedt een plan. Een paar principes en stappen en je beweging is onderweg, met jouw als leider. Een paar dingen die je kunt doen : publiceer een manifest, maak het makkelijk voor je volgers om contact te leggen, en om contact te leggen met anderen, realiseer je dat geld niet het doel is, en bewaak de voortgang. Web 2.0 levert alle (gratis) tools om dit te doen. Tribes is een klein, maar een briljant boekje. Een pareltje en misschien wel het meest invloedrijke boek dat Godin geschreven heeft na Permission Marketing.

Iconoclast en Tribes: twee boeken die laten zien dat modern leiderschap tussen de oren zit, elk moment van het dagelijks leven beoefend kan worden door iedereen. Met de juiste houding.