Inside the Minds of Very Good Dogs

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Two new books—one a methodical scientific account and one a freewheeling memoir—attempt to make sense of the canine brain.Photograph by Stefan Sobotta / VISUM / Redux

The poet Eileen Myles’s new memoir, “Afterglow,” is about a pit bull named Rosie, whom Myles plucked from a street litter, in 1990, and cared for until Rosie’s death, sixteen years later. Myles regarded Rosie as an artistic and spiritual partner, and “Afterglow” is a wry, gorgeous, psychedelic effort to plumb the subject of dog-human partnership—which, in its generic form, is the subject of many cheesy movies and bumper stickers (“Who Rescued Who?”) but which, with Myles and Rosie, appears as an exceptional power struggle, a thought experiment about the limits of consciousness, creativity, and love.

The book’s center of gravity is Rosie’s death, which governs both of their lives long before it happens. “I took such good care of her when she was dying. I relished it. She made me go slow,” Myles writes. “I attended my dog’s ass, the collapse of her rear legs that I saw as little high heels. I imagined her as a drag queen or a young girl unsteadily teetering. A touching failure . . . I felt less ambivalently loving than I have ever felt in my life.” Myles sees Rosie asleep—“I had to stare to catch her breathing”—and gets down on the floor to silently wrestle with their interdependence. “I felt like she was swimming in some fluid and I was in there with her. It was our intimacy . . . I wanted to keep swimming with her. But I couldn’t help it. I pulled out. I had to say no. I’m not dying with you. But who will I be without my dog? And I carried you to the bed.”

There is a destabilizing, unrelenting directness in Myles’s writing, and “Afterglow” is like the “Just Kids” of dog books: a punk devotional, shot through with a sort of divine attention to material reality and a poet’s associative leaps. Rosie gets a death-row meal of carne asada before the vet brings over the pink syringe. “Anna fed Rosie the whole serving by hand. Rosie’s eyes were large, bugged out like the only parts of her alive were the screaming whites of her eyes, the dark flat irises and her mouth. Prayerful but getting it down,” Myles writes. Walking out of the vet’s office, Myles remembers a movie “about the jungle. The man died under a tree. His friends were leaving him. Travel well I said. All the seeds of you; and the dream of you, the rot.” A line break gave me time to register that I was gasping a little. “Then I stepped back into the world.”

Like Myles’s autobiographical novel “Chelsea Girls,” from 1994, “Afterglow” is formally freewheeling. In one hallucinatory chapter, a puppet named Oscar interviews Rosie as hundreds of thousands of other puppets look on. Rosie tells Oscar that her name for her owner is Jethro: “I tell a few other dogs in the park—ugh here comes Jethro when she’s loping towards me with her big smile and a rope like it’s good news I’ve got to go home for hours and sit on the floor.” The chapter is formatted like a transcript, and Rosie, a good talk-show guest, gets philosophical: “Life is short. That’s the problem. It’s very hard for one dog to do much in one lifetime. Sixteen years. By the time you hit your message your body’s failing . . .” Rosie also tells the puppet that she’s the real artist, not Myles. “So yes I taught her to write. I showed her the way. Work changes in 1990 when I came on the scene.”

Elsewhere in the book, Rosie time-travels and writes a letter to Myles; one chapter appears in the form of an edit memo from Rosie. The distinctions between dog brain and human brain get fuzzy. Myles: “I can go walk the street looking for people to have dinner with. Then I put my nose in my notebook and I’m writing again.” Rosie: “Here I am surfing on the wing of a plane and I have a bone in my mouth. I am total pornography. I am dog. And the stars sprout strands of wheat, weeds, and flowers, the whole thing becomes day.” Myles offers long, ekphrastic readings of old home videos, and her consciousness merges with Rosie’s; it’s extraordinary:

We walk along a row of leaves chewed on by bugs purple flowers cars telephone poles trees this is California. Little luxuriant a little condemned. O look what we did. When all this was canyons and wild. Only blue. That god. Wand of the telephone pole reaching beyond makes this blue square active. Wad of me walking and you. Head and shoulders. Little mayor with your neck and head covered in light now and we turn onto a street that is dirt.

Here, through Myles’s keen and rough-edged sensibility, all the dog-owner clichés seem revivified and almost occult. How strange it is that one consciousness can do the work of two—that a human can heap words around the wordless soul of an animal and in doing so give it life after death. “Maybe my love has always been this way,” Myles writes, “a thing existing in language and so the ghost goes in and out the girl it’s based upon and now my dog. I can walk you whether you’re here or not. My god!”

The neuroscientist Gregory Berns, in his new book, “What It’s Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience,” considers canine science from a more methodical perspective. As its title suggests, the book is a rejoinder to Thomas Nagel’s canonical essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” from 1974, in which Nagel argues against material reductionism in cognitive science. Nagel makes the case that, no matter how sophisticated our understanding of echolocation, we could never truly understand a bat’s subjective experience. Berns, who has spent much of the past five years training dogs to sit patiently in special earmuffs inside MRI machines and getting them to participate in other experiments, believes that it is theoretically possible for us to obtain a partial but meaningful understanding of non-human animal consciousness—and that, thanks to new neuroimaging techniques, this understanding is increasingly within reach.

Berns’s argument is simple. Human brain structure is not radically different from canine brain structure; recent advances have allowed scientists to definitively link physical activity in the human brain to “discrete mental states.” It stands to reason that we might apply these new technologies to understand the cognitive experience of dogs. “Instead of trying to answer the big question of what it is like to be a dog, we can be more precise,” he writes. “What is it like for a dog to experience joy?” And so, in pursuit of the answers, Berns put together a group of “service-dog washouts,” taught them to stay calm inside MRI equipment, and mapped their neural activity as the good dogs performed adjusted versions of classic experiments in children’s cognition—the marshmallow test, the A-or-B test in object permanence, and so on.

One of the most delightful things about “What It’s Like to Be a Dog” is the attention Berns pays to each dog’s individual quirks. This comes from his lifelong dog-owner’s sense that, as he writes, dogs “had personalities, and they had likes and dislikes, and purposeful behavior that suggested a higher level of thinking than behaviorist models gave them credit for.” The awareness of dog personality also governs Berns’s research. With the “doggie-marshmallow test,” a self-control experiment that required its subjects to hold off eating a treat for long periods, Berns’s team quickly figured out that not all dogs would activate the same cognitive mechanism while performing the same task. Some dogs, like one named Tug, wanted the treat, and so needed to use self-control to refrain from eating it. Others, though, such as Kady, a golden retriever that Berns describes both as “one of the sweetest dogs I had ever met” and also as “rather vacuous,” showed no sign of wanting the treat. She would pass the test thanks to either inhibition or a desire to please, not self-control.

And so, each experiment had to be designed to account for individual canine decision-making. Some of the research set out to clarify how exactly that decision-making differed. One experiment asked the dogs to choose between hot dogs or praise from their owners. Most dogs responded to hot dogs and praise equally, though not always in the same sequence—some dogs would seek out a lot of hot dogs and then a lot of praise; others would alternate evenly. Twenty per cent of dogs chose praise more often than food, suggesting a surfeit of affection for their owners. (In another experiment, Berns showed his dogs a series of photos and video clips while scanning their brains, and found that there was a discrete region of the brain that lit up when the dogs were processing faces.)

Berns’s research is unusual in its emphasis on voluntary participation: the dogs had to get inside the MRI machine and stay there of their own (trained) accord. For academic researchers, he wrote, “it was heresy to allow an animal the choice of submitting or not submitting to a human’s will. It rejected practices typical of the entire industry of laboratory animal research, not to mention industrialized farming.” But, as he reveals at the close of the book, Berns was atoning for an event from decades ago—a “dog lab” in medical school, where he and his colleagues monitored the effects of anesthesia on a shelter dog and then gave it a lethal injection. At the suggestion of a supervisor, Berns severed the dog’s pulmonary artery to save it ten minutes of slow death. “The lab didn’t make me a better doctor, and it diminished me as a human being,” he wrote. “I think now that, by trying to find out what dogs think and feel, I was trying to make amends.”