Anyone who has a dog has spent some time wondering what’s going on in their canine friend’s head — if not thinking they already know for sure. Harvard’s Canine Brains Project is trying to, scientifically, nail that down. The project was featured in the Netflix documentary “Inside the Mind of a Dog.”

To find out more about dog brains, GBH’s Morning Edition host Mark Herz spoke with Sophie Barton, a PhD student who’s currently leading several canine brain project studies. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Mark Herz: Why look at their brains? What don’t we know yet about dogs, and what are you hoping to find out?

Sophie Barton: We actually know very little about dog brains. And this is because for a long time, historically, dogs were not seen as a worthy subject of study — mostly because they were a domesticated species. But nowadays, people are realizing that you can actually glean insights from dogs that might be relevant to other species. For example, I’m really interested in understanding how selective breeding has changed their brains — and so how humans have actually been actively shaping dogs to live in our society and cooperate with us.

Herz: Tell us about the different studies, because there’s more than one, and the different methods. What questions are you hoping to answer?

Barton: We have a couple of different classes of studies. We have our neuroimaging studies that are looking at the brain and with those sorts of studies we can actually understand how a brain structure relates to things like personality, or how they perform in a behavioral test. We’re also looking at their genes so that we can look at how genes relate to the brain.

Then, in another class of our studies, we’re looking at behavior to infer insights about the brain. We’re doing one where we’re looking at village dogs. So these are dogs that come from free-ranging populations that have actually been shaped more by artificial selection than natural selection. And we’re trying to understand how they do in a Western household, how they do as a normal pet dog.

Then we also have a lot of online surveys that people can fill out — so you don’t even have to come to the lab to participate. We have plenty of surveys online that are gathering information about cognition and temperament and things like that.

“We actually know very little about dog brains.”
Sophie Barton, Harvard PhD candidate working on the Canine Brains Project

Herz: Now, you say on your web bio that you yourself draw inspiration from your rescue dog, Tamsin, how so?

Barton: First of all, she pilots all of my studies. I’ve scanned her brain and I’ve seen what it looks like — and luckily it’s a very healthy, nice brain. But she pilots all my studies and helps me understand what’s going to work for a lot of dogs, what might not work for a lot of dogs.

So with our behavioral tests, it’s a very fine line of making tests that are scientifically interesting but easy enough for most dogs to be able to actually complete them. So she’s a good average dog that gives me a good insight into that.

Herz: Wow. What have you found out so far in any of these studies?

Barton: I published a study a couple of years ago that was basically interested in understanding if dog brain organization was similar to humans in the sense of, are their brains very asymmetrical? Even though they outwardly look symmetrical, they’re actually quite asymmetrical in humans, and a lot of this is related to human language processing. And so people have thought historically this is a really big hallmark of our species. That makes us special.

And so I was like, “Well, I wonder if maybe since dogs live in the human environment, if they might have asymmetrical brains as well.” Turns out that they’re very asymmetrical — in some ways that parallel human brains.

Another study that recently got published found that dogs have circuitry in their brains that are parallel to what humans have for language. And so I’m not saying that dogs actually can produce language, of course, but it seems like they have neural circuitry for interpreting it. And it turns out that the more words that a dog knows, the more robust the circuitry is.

Herz: Fascinating stuff. Sophie Barton with Harvard’s Canine Brains Project. The study is currently enrolling dogs for both online and in-person studies.