Unconditional love , forever loyalty and an exceptional ability to capture the emotions of its owner. These are the main characteristics of the relationship that a dog establishes with the human being , something that still surprises science, but which justifies the famous saying that “the dog is man’s best friend.” However, we want to go further and explain what scientists have really discovered about why it is said that the dog is man’s best friend.
Why is it said that the dog is man’s best friend?
It seems that the answer to the question of why the dog is man’s best friend lies in a region of the brain that we share with our most loyal companions.
Dogs and humans have been close for millennia . A fusion relationship and a level of understanding of the animal with the human that always leaves us surprised, but where does this love and unwavering devotion of the dog for man (and vice versa) come from? The answer is found in a Hungarian study published three years ago in the journal Current Biology, in which it was revealed that the dog and the human being share the same region of the brain dedicated to the voice and the recognition of transmitted emotions.
This peculiarity finds its origin even before the dominance of agriculture, an exception for an animal domesticated by humans. In ancient times there were already points in common between dogs and humans, such as the fact that they are two social species that live in the same places and hunt more or less the same prey, but this does not explain the strength of the bond that animates these two species . It is now that researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, found that there are similarities in the brain as well, with humans and dogs sharing the same determining region.
For their work, these researchers focused on the brain response to voice , in humans and dogs, as well as the reaction to the emotion contained in sound. After training eleven dogs to stay still with headphones on, they were placed on a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, as were the 22 humans who went through the same process. What they then had to do was listen to a series of about 200 different sounds , including sequences of funny laughter or barking, as well as crying or whining moans. During this time, the brain activity of each subject was analyzed.
The researchers then observed that in the back of the brain, a similar region is activated by hearing the voice . In addition, it has been noted that there are similarities in the way of dealing with emotionally charged voices. For example, the area near the primary auditory cortex is activated more significantly in joy than in sadness.
For the researchers, these results reveal that this brain function would have been present in the last common ancestor of humans and dogs , dating back about 100 million years . But it also suggests that other animals with whom humans share this common ancestor may have this brain function.
