In March 2014, I published "Pets and the Afterlife" about how dogs, cats and horses are able to communicate with us from the other side, and how they can sense ghosts and spirits. In order to communicate, pets need to understand our emotions and language, and they do. Every month new scientific evidence comes out to prove the intelligence of our pets. Here's one from SCIENCE Magazine that came out in Feb. 2014. - Rob
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PETS AND THE AFTERLIFE by Rob Gutro: The
loss of a pet is like the loss of a child to pet owners. The love we
share with our pets never dies, and in a new book called "Pets and the
Afterlife" by Rob Gutro, the author provides proof that our pets do
communicate with us from the other side. Available in paperback and E-book, on Amazon.com and other outlets at: To order paperback of Kindle- click here
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When
you hear a friend’s voice, you immediately picture her, even if you
can’t see her. And from the tone of her speech, you quickly gauge if
she’s happy or sad. You can do all of this because your human brain has a
“voice area.” Now, scientists using brain scanners and a crew of eager
dogs have discovered that dog brains, too, have dedicated voice areas.
The finding helps explain how canines can be so attuned to their owners’
feelings.
“It’s absolutely brilliant, groundbreaking research,” says Pascal
Belin, a neuroscientist at the University of Glasgow in the United
Kingdom, who was part of the team that identified the voice areas in the
human brain in 2000. “They’ve made the first comparative study using
nonhuman primates of the cerebral processing of voices, and they’ve done
it with a noninvasive technique by training dogs to lie in a scanner.”
The scientists behind the discovery had previously shown that
humans can readily distinguish between dogs’ happy and sad barks.
“Dogs and humans share a similar social environment,” says Attila
Andics, a neuroscientist in a research group at the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and the lead author of
the new study. “So we wondered if dogs also get some social information
from human voices.”
To find out, Andics and his colleagues decided to scan the canine
brain to see how it processes different types of sounds, including
voices, barks, and natural noises. In humans, the voice area is
activated when we hear others speak, helping us recognize a speaker’s
identity and pick up on the emotional content in her voice. If dogs had
voice areas, it could mean that these abilities aren’t limited to humans
and other primates.
So the team trained 11 dogs to lie motionless in a functional
magnetic resonance imaging brain scanner, while wearing headphones to
deliver the sounds and protect their ears. “They loved doing this,”
Andics says, adding that the pooches’ owners were there to reward them
with treats and petting. The scanner captured images of the dogs’ brain
activity while they listened to nearly 200 dog and human sounds,
including whines, cries, playful barks, and laughs. The scientists also
scanned the brains of 22 human subjects who listened to the same set of
sounds. Both dogs and humans were awake during the scans.
The images revealed that
dog brains have voice areas and that they process voices in the same way that human brains do, the team reports online today in
Current Biology.
And because these voice areas are found in similar locations in the
brains of both dogs and humans, the scientists suggest that they likely
evolved at least 100 million years ago, when humans and dogs last shared
a common ancestor, an insectivore. Indeed, some think that brain areas
for processing vocal sounds could be discovered in more species.
Still, when voice areas were first discovered in humans, they were
thought to be special and somehow tied specifically to the evolution of
language. “So what are they doing in dog brains?” Andics asks.
The answer lies, he thinks, in what the scans also revealed: Striking
similarities in how dog and human brains process emotionally laden
sounds. Happy sounds, such as an infant’s giggle, made the primary
auditory cortex of both species light up more than did unhappy sounds,
such as a man’s harsh cough. “It shows that dogs and humans have similar
brain mechanisms for processing the social meaning of sound,” Andics
says, noting that other research has shown that dogs “respond to the
way we say something rather than to
what
we say.” The similarity in auditory
processing, he adds, “helps explain
why vocal communication between the two species is so successful.”
But there were differences, too. The researchers discovered that in
dogs, 48% of their auditory brain regions respond more strongly to
environmental sounds, such as a car engine, than to voices. In humans,
in contrast, a mere 3% of their sound-sensitive brain regions lit up
more for the nonvocal sounds. “It shows how very strongly attuned the
human auditory cortex is to vocal sounds,” Andics says. “In dogs, it’s
more heterogeneous.”
Yet it is the similarity in how dogs and humans process the emotional
information in voices that other researchers find most intriguing.
“They’ve confirmed what any dog owner knows—that their pooches are
sensitive to one’s tone of voice,” says John Marzluff, a wildlife
biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. Even more important,
he adds, is that the study “confronts us with the realization that our
wonderful brain is in many ways a product of our distant evolutionary
past.”
Rob is a meteorologist who uses science to explain their existence and
communications. He wrote this book to give hope to others who lost
people or pets. 
