Inside a sound- and scent-proof room at Harvard’s Canine Brains Lab, photographer Elias Weiss Friedman tapped a hammer on the floor near his hand as Sasha, the Harvard University Police Department’s community engagement dog, watched attentively. When Friedman feigned injury, pretending to hit his thumb and crying out in pain, the black Labrador looked briefly to Officer Steve Fumicello, her handler, before rushing to Friedman and licking his face. The moment was part of an experiment used regularly to assess the empathy of dogs in the lab.
“Some [dogs] react like that, some of them couldn’t care less,” explained Erin Hecht, assistant professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, who runs the Canine Brains Project. “In the real test, the person does this three times, and we had a couple of dogs actually take the hammer away.”
Friedman, founder of popular social media account “The Dogist,” visited Hecht’s lab last week. Friedman has photographed more than 50,000 dogs while Hecht uses a different kind of imagery — MRIs — to study the science behind the beloved pet.
“I’m OK, I was just joshing,” Friedman reassured Sasha, after the experiment, while petting her ears. “Thank you for being so empathetic and caring, because if that were to happen in real life I would need your love.”
Hecht and Friedman later discussed the way they each approach dogs visually in a fireside chat at Kirkland House moderated by Faculty Dean David Deming, Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
“They make great photographic subjects because they’re 100 percent candid,” said Friedman, whose new book, “This Dog Will Change Your Life,” is forthcoming. “You can look at a dog and see the expression on their face and know that they’re being 100 percent honest, and there’s something very great about that.”
Hecht said MRI scans allow her to explore the question many dog owners have wondered at some point: What is going on inside their head?
“You can see all kinds of things, signatures of fearfulness, or aggression, or trainability, something we might think of as cognitive capacity or ability to learn, and differences between breeds that might relate to their historical functions,” Hecht said. “I still get shivers when we get a dog in the scanner and their brain image comes up for the first time. It’s like, ‘Wow, there’s a brain in there. That is the dog, all of its emotions and thoughts and plans and desires, we’re looking at it right now.’”
“You can look at a dog and see the expression on their face and know that they’re being 100 percent honest, and there’s something very great about that.”
Elias Weiss Friedman
She said that in science, it’s always possible to invest time in a study only to find no significant results. But that hasn’t been the case with her dog research, likely because of the remarkable variability in canine brains and their close ties to behavior. Hecht’s lab is actively recruiting dogs for research studies, particularly seeking dogs with behavioral issues related to early life stress or trauma. They are also looking for children ages 7 to 12 and their dogs to participate in a study exploring the bonds between kids and their pets.
Friedman said dogs are like “furry icebreakers” that have helped him meet tens of thousands of interesting people as part of his work.
“Before you get a dog you know your neighbor, and after you get a dog you know your neighborhood,” Friedman said. “There is this force of community and socialization when your dog needs to go out, you just end up meeting like 10 people. That’s very real.”
Hecht said dogs have been bred to be good at making friends with people.
“The ability to form a bond with people is the most fundamental thing that they’ve evolved. We are their social partners. Their natural place in the world is within human society. They’re adapted for our world,” Hecht said. “Then humans have developed different lineages of dogs. Some breeds need to be defensive and territorial in order to protect a family or a flock of sheep. Others need to do a job that’s more interactive with the environment. It’s this huge range of cognitive styles.”
During the Q&A, students asked Friedman and Hecht a range of questions: “Do dogs pick favorites within the household?” (Hecht: They have favorites for different activities); “Are dogs judgmental?” (Hecht: They can intuit when people’s intentions are not friendly); and “Do people really look like their dogs?” (Friedman: Yes).
When asked if there were any dogs that stood out from the thousands he has photographed, Friedman recalled Pudding, a pit bull mix bearing the scars of past abuse, whom he photographed back in 2013 when his Instagram account was barely a month old.
“Until then I had been going about it as the joke, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to photograph dogs?’” Friedman recalled. “This was a pivotal dog because it made me realize this project was much more profound. Dogs make us laugh and cry and there’s some beauty and sadness, and it’s important that I share all of it.”
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