22. Dr. Gregory Berns — What It’s Like to Be a Dog…and Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2018

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this wide-ranging dialogue (recorded on September 1, 2017) on the nature of consciousness Dr. Michael Shermer talks with Dr. Gregory Berns, Distinguished Professor of Neuroeconomics and Director of the Center for Neuropolicy and Facility for Education and Research in Neuroscience.

Dr. Berns is famous for his use of fMRI to study canine cognitive function in awake, unrestrained dogs. The goals of his research are to non-invasively map the perceptual and decision systems of the dog’s brain and to predict likelihood of success in service dogs. He also uses diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to reconstruct the white matter pathways of a wide variety of other mammals, including dolphins, sea lions, coyotes, and the extinct Tasmanian tiger.

Shermer and Berns address the so-called “Hard Problem of Consciousness” of “what is it like to be a bat (or dog)?” What is it like to be another sentient being has been impossible to understand until and unless we can get inside the other conscious creature’s head. Now we can thanks to this new technology. Of course, we cannot have a first-person subjective experience of being a dog—and in this sense the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” is something of a conceptual error inasmuch as it can never be answered in this first-person subjective sense, but we can come close to understanding what dogs (and other conscious creatures) are thinking and feeling.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations
0:10.4	with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.
0:17.0	So to our listeners, this is one of our remote science salons where we dialogue with scientists and authors
0:28.6	when we can't get them in person in our studio in the Southern California here and we're talking to Dr. Gregory Burns
0:35.7	is the author of what it's like to be a dog and other adventures in animal neuroscience. If you didn't know that's't know, that's a field.
0:43.8	That's a field.
0:44.8	It's something of a sequel to your previous book,
0:47.4	How Dogs Loveus.
0:48.5	Dr. Burns is a professor of psychology at Emory University,
0:52.1	and really one of the pioneers of the idea of getting
0:55.6	a dog to sit still inside of a MRI machine long enough to scan his brain.
1:00.9	I've had dogs my whole life.
1:02.2	I now have a dog that looks something similar to this. I have a chocolate lab. His name is Hitch, named after Christopher Hitchins. We call him Hitchy and so I often sit there and stare at I'm thinking what is this guy thinking what's what's going on inside his head and
1:17.8	So maybe just by way of background before we get in all the great philosophical issues that you bring up in the book. It's a great read by the way,
1:24.0	really well written, really compelling, and very moving toward the end when you're talking about animal rights and, you know, these
1:30.6	are sentient beings. They feel they suffer. We should care about them.
1:34.0	And I'm encouraged that more and more we are doing that. I think this is the kind of research that will push the
1:39.8	moral arc a little further along toward justice for other sentient beans species that are not us.
1:47.0	By way of background, just tell us how you got into this.
1:50.0	It started as a side project actually back in 2011.
1:55.0	So most of my career has been using functional imaging primarily MRI
2:01.0	to study how the human brain works.
	...

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