Book Review: How Dogs Love Us

How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain By Gregory Berns 272 pages. New Harvest 2013. In How Dogs Love Us, author, Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns, takes us on a heart warming journey to discover what his dog, Callie, is thinking.   Most of the book is taken up by Berns discussing the design of the research protocols and describing the process of getting the Dog Research Project through the academia research approval process. He peppers the discussion with excellent descriptions of how MRIs and fMRIs operate.   Through the research, Berns shows that the activation of the caudate, the brain’s reward-system, is similar in dogs and humans.   In the end his grand conclusion to the question “What are dogs thinking?” is “They’re thinking about what we’re thinking.”