According to a recent study, brain scans showed human responses to people’s dogs are not unlike those evoked by their children.
Lori Palley, who led the study with Luke Stoeckel at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said, “the overlap says a lot about how similar the relationships could be, but we’re only speculating.”
“Basically we compared the human-pet bond with that of the maternal-child relationship and analyzed patterns of brain activity when moms viewed the images with the aim of understanding what areas might be common and what areas distinct,” said Palley, who is assistant director of Veterinary Services at the hospital’s Center for Comparative Medicine.
When moms saw pictures of their own kids and their own dogs, areas of their brains associated with social cognition, emotion, visual processing and reward showed increased activity.
Additionally, there was increased brain activity in areas involved in bond formation (typically maternal-child and romantic bonds) when mothers saw pictures of their own children versus their own dogs.
“What’s really interesting about this is we suspect that perhaps there is some evolutionary significance to that,” said Palley. “It would make sense that would be an area where you would want it to be kind of specific for relationships that should be sustained at all costs.”
One area of the brain involved in visual and social processing was more active when moms saw pictures of their pets versus their kids.
“I think perhaps we process the dog’s face differently than we process the human face, but we don’t know that. We’d actually have to do more work to look at that area more specifically to determine exactly what this finding means,” said Palley.
These findings help support what many researchers have already suspected, according to Alan M. Beck, professor and director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University School of Veterinary Medicine.
“We have a long history, a kind of affiliation,” said Beck of the relationship people have with dogs. “Dogs learn from us, we learn from dogs, so it’s not surprising that even brain activity would show how inborn it is.”
“It was kind of cool,” Beck said of the study. “It’s just one of the tools that allows a better understanding that this is a true biological/species behavior as opposed to something we’ve learned from our mothers to be nice to animals.”
Added Beck, “we are wired to some degree to be nurturers of critters that evoke a desire of being nurtured and cared for.” phillyinquirerhealth.com 10/17/14