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The Economist: Canines have lateralised brains



 
 
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Old November 8th 13, 08:08 AM posted to rec.pets.dogs.behavior
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Default The Economist: Canines have lateralised brains

The Economist 2013.11.02
Animal behaviour
Wag the Dog
Canines have lateralised brains-just like people

Sinister v dexterous. Commie v Tory. The difference between left and
right carries more meaning to human beings than mere matters of
handedness and symmetry. And so it is with man's best friend as well.
For in dogs, too, left and right signal different things.
Specifically, it is in the way they wag their tails. And for dogs,
like people, it is the left-hand side that is sinister.

The story started a few years ago when Giorgio Vallortigara of the
University of Trento, in Italy, and his colleagues, established that
dogs wag their tails to the right when they see something pleasant,
such as a beloved human master, and to the left when they see
something unpleasant, such as an unfamiliar dominant dog. What Dr
Vallortigara did not establish then was whether such signals are
meaningful to other dogs. Now, he and the team from the previous study
have done just that.

As they report in Current Biology, they wired up several dozen dogs of
both sexes and various breeds with electrodes, to record the animals'
heart rates, and then showed them videos of dogs, or silhouettes of
dogs, head-on, with tail wagging to left or right. A left-wagging
tail, they found, induced a higher maximum heart rate (in other words,
an anxiety response) than a right-wagging tail, and this maximum heart
rate lasted longer. A right-wagging tail, indeed, produced the same
results as one that was stationary.

Dr Vallortigara and his colleagues also observed their animals during
the experiment, noting behaviours such as ear-flattening,
head-lowering and whining that are associated with stress. They found
that stressed behaviours were more common in the presence of
left-wagging than right-wagging.

All this suggests lateral specialisation in dogs' brains. The nervous
signals for left-wagging and right-wagging originate in different
hemispheres. (Because of the peculiar way vertebrate brains are wired
up, it is the left hemisphere that controls right-wagging, and vice
versa-as is the case for handedness in people.) That they are
triggered by different emotions shows that the two halves of a dog
brain work, in this respect at least, differently.

Human brains are similarly lateralised. Handedness is one example.
Another is language, a function predominantly of the left hemisphere.
Whether it is just a coincidence that dogs and people agree about
which side is sinister, or whether there is something deeper going on,
remains to be determined.

http://www.economist.com/news/scienc...people-wag-dog
http://preview.tinyurl.com/n4od4ez
--
Bob
www.kanyak.com
 




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