--:-- [Theme music plays]
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Welcome to Explain It To Me. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, sitting in for JQ this week.
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--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying. But are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I was at a friend's backyard to see him play a show. It was a literal dog show. Well, a good dog on the ground's worth three in the saddle. No matter where you're from. Been many good dogs, his friend knew him in. But Sam was the greatest one. He was a pound of pounds. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, by the way, sitting in for JQ this week. And I'm not exactly a dog guy. I mean, I'm not a hater. I love petting a fuzzy puppy in a sunny spot. As much as the next guy.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: But these people at this show, these were dog people. Well, a three-legged dog walks into a saloon and he says, I'm looking for the man who shot my paw. And then there was me, dogless, watching a band called The Beagles run through their greatest hits. Who let the dogs out? Everyone seemed like they were having a great time. The people seemed happy. The dog seemed happy. But as I was sitting there, I started wondering, am I sure? Like, I barely know what other people are feeling. How could I be sure about a dog?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: So I was excited when I found out a listener was wondering the same thing. The things that we perceive through our human lens to be sad or happy or whatever it might be, is that actually what's happening in the dog's brain? This question came from Jared Martin, who's a filmmaker living in L.A.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: But probably more important than that is my little child here, my child, dog child here, Enzo. Enzo, tell me about Enzo. So Enzo is two and a half. He'll be three in early September. I've had him since he was about eight weeks old. He's trying to get out of my lap right now. He's a mix, a total mutt.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: And yeah, I got him. I recently had lived with a roommate for like over 10 years, moved out on my own. And I was like, he thought it'd be great. And then I got really lonely. And I was like, well, I kind of want to get a dog. And we found each other. It was just kind of like the stars aligned and the rest is history.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: How well do you think you guys communicate? There seems to be something like a special connection that we have, I feel, that's different than other interactions I've had with dogs, but also like dogs that I've had, you know, in my life.
--:-- Chelsea: Hi, my name is Chelsea, and I really feel like I can communicate with my dog. Her name is Sweet Pea. She is a Chawini, and she taught herself how to say yes to things.
--:-- Chelsea: So we adopted our dog, Rico, a couple of years ago. He was a Puerto Rican street dog. And from the moment I met him, I knew that he was going to be my sole dog.
--:-- Chelsea: I've had my dog, Vixen, since I was 19 years old. I adopted her when I was in college. She is like my entire life. I call her the love of my life. And my husband gets super annoyed, but it's true.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: There you have it. I believe that I can read my dog's mind. Maybe I'm projecting, but I don't care. I believe it's true. But at a certain level, even Jared isn't sure.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I definitely feel these things, and I just don't, yeah, there's sort of a disconnect there, too, of like, am I actually understanding this the way I think I am?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Can we ask Enzo a question? Yes, Enzo. Ask Enzo if he thinks you understand him. Enzo, do you understand me? Do you understand me?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Yeah? No? He's like, where's the reward?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: This week on Explain It To Me, we're going to ask the question Enzo refuses to answer. Do we actually know what our dogs are feeling? Or are we just fooling ourselves?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio Adio is an AI native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio Adio takes less than a minute to set up And within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced You see all your relationships in a fully platform they say all enriched with that actionable data
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to addio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Lots of people are obsessed with animals. And it makes sense why. On the one hand, they're like aliens. And on the other, there's this feeling that they're just like us.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: You can see this in movies like Air Bud or Babe or Babe, Pig in the City. My human tied me in a bag and throwed me in the water. And yeah, it's fun to suspend our disbelief a little and watch a dog play basketball.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: But even serious documentaries do this, like March of the Penguins. They're not that different from us, really. They pout. They bellow. They strut.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: You get the sense that so many people who are looking at animals are just searching for the little humans inside the outer shell. But there are some people who don't spend their time trying to find the little humans inside. They're obsessed with how alien animals are.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: I grew up watching Animal Planet. I started when I was like three years old. And I thought what makes animals so cool is they're not human.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: I have this vivid memory of first grade watching an ant crawl across the window. And my teacher yelled at me because I wasn't paying attention. But I was just fascinated with like, what could this ant be thinking? There's no way. It's just like thinking human thoughts walking along the window.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: Holly had the same question our listener Jared did. The same question I did. Can we ever understand what animals are feeling? I know from my own personal experience, like, we just project our emotions onto animals. We think we know what they're feeling.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: And that has always just, like, sat wrong for me, like, throughout my whole life. Even though it's so fun to do, like, my cat's sitting in my lap now. Like, oh my gosh, she's obviously loving me so much right now.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: But in terms of taking care of them, those, like, biases can get in the way. She did find some research that made it seem like even trying to understand other humans could be hard.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: There were these researchers that Photoshopped the face of someone with one expression onto different kinds of body postures. So postures that were disgusted or sad or afraid or angry.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: But when people looked at these images, even though the face was the same, people thought the emotions were different. They cared more about the context of the picture than the actual face.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: And so I was like, what if we just did this with dogs? What if I changed things around the dog and asked people the same question? What do you think the dog is feeling?
--:-- Holly Molinaro: So Holly designed a study. This study is called Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Human perception of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: She started with Zoom. It was like, you know, 2021, so pandemic time still. And just like Zoom blurs out the background, I was like, well, I feel like I could figure out how to do that.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: Oh, like blur out everything except the dog? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Took a crash course in video editing on YouTube, you know, and figured out that you can like take away the background with software editing.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: But then I needed dogs to do it. And I go home for Christmas break and I see my dad and my dog interacting. I was like, this is perfect. Can you tell me about your family dog? Yeah, Oliver. He sadly passed away a couple years ago.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: So it's really sweet that his memory now lives on in this research. He was like a beagle boxer pointer mix. We got him from a shelter when I was like in fifth grade. And him and my dad were like so tight.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: So we cleared out the living room. We moved all the furniture away. And I just asked my dad to do things that people would think is positive. So like seeing a leash, seeing a treat, getting praise, being played with.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: And then things that people would think Oliver doesn't like. So seeing the cat, the vacuum cleaner, being reprimanded. And I just filmed everything to make sure that I got like a bunch of videos that I could then figure out how to edit them.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: So if you're trying to study whether we can tell if dogs are happy or sad, how do you know if Oliver likes cats or vacuums in the first place? One was just like we wanted to do like general perceptions of people. So like what would generally people associate positive or negative with dogs?
--:-- Holly Molinaro: But that is like a good point that has been brought up a lot is that I don't really know how Oliver was feeling with those things. You'd need to actually do some different type of studies to see how Oliver was actually feeling.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: But ultimately, in fairness to you, right, like you're not studying what Oliver is feeling, right? You're studying what we think he's feeling.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: Exactly. So I did the video. So all you saw was Oliver on a black background. And then I set up this survey, sent it out to ASU psychology undergraduate. We had like 400 participants in the first study and first showed them six videos of Oliver on a black background.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: So three were when Oliver was in a positive situation and three were when Oliver was in a negative situation. And showed them just the video of Oliver on a black background and said how happy or sad you think Oliver is and also how calm or agitated.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: And then we showed them the original videos with my dad in there. You could see everything. And this time their responses were different. So before, when they couldn't see the backgrounds, all they saw was Oliver, they could not tell the difference between positive or negative videos.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: But suddenly when they could see everything, they saw the context, they saw my dad, they rated the positive videos as Oliver feeling happy and they rated the negative videos as Oliver feeling sad.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: Can you show me some of these videos? Let me open up my Dropbox. Okay, here we go. So you can see that. Oh, he's so cute. Okay, I'll play it. Kind of like looking around, licking his chops a little bit. Seems kind of like a neutral.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: Okay, all right. Now, all right, ready? Uh-huh. Oh, God. No, he seems so sad now. Yeah, so Oliver looks exactly the same. But now that I see your dad yelling at him, it seems like he's learning a lesson now.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: Yeah. So what do you think this study tells us about us or about dogs or how we relate to dogs?
--:-- Holly Molinaro: I think, number one, we're just not as smart as we think we are when it comes to understanding our dogs. And sometimes people are like that really depressing Holly And I like no no it OK because now we can actually start to pay attention Now we can like recognize that we do this and start to look at our own dogs and just kind of get away from like blanket statements of oh tail wagging equals happiness barking equals upset and actually pay attention to your own dog
--:-- Holly Molinaro: I also trying to develop a new theory for animal emotion. A new theory of animal emotion or a new theory of dog emotion? My proposed theory is just to start from like a species specific point of view, And maybe like dogs have their own set of emotions and try to figure out what emotional capabilities they might have that we humans could never even comprehend because we're not dogs.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: So instead of looking for what does happiness look in a dog, let's come up with just like a brand new word. Maybe dogs have some type of like happiness, but it's like subservience because they like love to do things for us.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: And then we can like look at their behavior in this context and kind of piece together bits and then come up with a whole new dog emotion. That's really interesting.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: So you're kind of saying let's not try to put them on our terms. Let's see them on their terms. Exactly. Exactly.
--:-- Holly Molinaro: So what if we stopped treating dogs like fuzzy little humans? What would it be like to see dogs on their terms, not ours?
--:-- [Theme music plays]
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Support for the show today comes from Life Kit, the podcast from NPR. What's in your life kit? I'm asking. They didn't ask that. Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Instead, you can listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Life Kit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Enough from me. Go listen to the show, Life Kit. It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Well, I might not say this at a dinner party because then the whole dinner party will be about dogs. But I'm Alexandra Horowitz and I run the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College in New York City.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: And I study what it's like to be a dog. That is one thing. You're right. You can't say that to people. It'll just derail any conversation. Yeah, it's really, if I want myself to be the center of attention, that's, I guess, the thing to say.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: But often I don't. So, yeah, I don't lead with it. Okay, so in the previous segment, we just heard how people can misinterpret their dogs. They can maybe think they're feeling something and maybe they're not feeling something.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: But you, you know exactly what they're feeling, right? Definitely not. but that is entirely what I'm interested in.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Okay. Sure, and I guess part of the first step is to kind of forget about my automatic assumptions about what they're feeling, which is a very normal step for people to take, especially people who live with dogs, but it's from our point of view, and I think we have to try to take the dog's point of view.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Okay, so how do you start to take the dog's point of view? What does that even mean? So they are smelling animals. Smell is their primary sense.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: And my interest is in saying like, well, okay, let's try to understand the dog's way of seeing the world through their nose, instead of just assuming that they're just like us, you know, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I'm sitting on the couch.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Yeah, I think the best way maybe to describe what it's like to take that seriously, to take sort of a nose first perspective of the world is to ask you about your experience doing this.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: You kind of did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog. How should I put that? Yeah, I mean, I tried to sort of step into some of the dog's behaviors, I guess, in order to a little bit understand them.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Because here's one thing about smell versus vision. We're visual creatures, let's acknowledge, right? We see the world first. But if you're a smelling creature, I thought, well, you know, how do you see the world? Smells don't just appear when you open your nose, when you exist in the space.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: If you look at dog behavior, they go and search out smells, right? They spend a lot of time with their nose on the ground or smelling objects that are nose height. And they sniff a lot more than we do.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: You know, our sniffs are pretty feeble little sniffs, and they'll do seven sniffs a second if they want to get a really good sense of something. And so I tried to do those things. I mean, that was just the first step is going around and saying like, all right, what are smells like down at dog height?
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: And what does something smell like if I put my nose right up to it? I feel like I need to get a bit more detail here. You're walking around. Where are you walking around trying to smell things at dog height?
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Well, I did this in New York City, right where I live. So no one gave you a second thought, right? Because it's New York City. Oh, no. People moved away from me. You know, that's for sure.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: But I walked out of my house and followed what my dog did. Where he sniffed, I would lean down and sniff with him. I would get to his height, see what he sniffed, and try to smell it myself, right? Is it a tree post protecting a tree from people on the sidewalk? Is it a bush? Is it the grass? Something in the grass that is super interesting to him that I try to smell.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: I didn't sniff other dog butts because there are other issues involved there. But if a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: What do you think this experience of trying to smell everything the dog smells told you about what it might be like to be a dog?
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Well, I think the big lesson for me was that unlike the way I had kind of characterized smells in my life, which I think is very human, as kind of good or bad, right? Smells are something appealing, maybe a food smell or something unappealing.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Like in New York, there are lots of those smells like garbage in the summer. But for dogs, I think smells are just information. They're just information about the way the world is.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: So their world is wrought of smells the way ours is wrought of visual images. You know when I think of looking at the world I kind of create I don know a spatial map of the world right Like I walk through my apartment and I look around Here the door Here the window Here the hall
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: If you're doing something like that through smell, on the one hand, I have no idea what that means, right? I have no idea how to wrap my head around that.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: But what does that mean for the world you live in if you're mapping it by smelling it? Well, a space inside, I think, is sort of redefined in smell as being less static, right? So smells move.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: That's one of the interesting things about them. So we know this. You have a cup of coffee, you put it on the table, and you can smell it on the other side of the table, right? The smell comes out of it.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: So where that coffee is, is like a slightly different space, maybe, to a, let's say, purely olfactory creature than to a visual creature. It's right in the cup to me, but to somebody who's seeing the world through smell, it's in this whole kind of universe around the cup as the smells go into the air.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Oh, that's fascinating. That doesn't mean that there's nothing concrete and real. It just means that it's a little more transient than we see.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Yeah, if I were to think about what that means for what it's like to be a dog, right, it feels a lot more chaotic. I mean, if I'm, again, walking through my apartment, if I go into my living room and I'm like, okay, here's the couch. It's just right here. I can put my hand on the couch and then I can put my hand a little bit to the side and there's no couch.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: And I feel like if I just smelled everything, everything would be kind of moving and fading and coming back and it would be blurry and chaotic. I think chaos, the idea that it's chaotic is just because we aren't using our noses this way.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: If you look at dogs' behavior, it doesn't seem very chaotic. I mean, their behavior kind of is consistent with this just very organized but different way of seeing.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: It also feels like if things that a dog is smelling are changing all the time, It feels like the way they might be interacting with the world would depend a lot on time.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Yeah, I think time is in smell. My presence in this room really smells to my dog. And when I've been gone for an hour, I think I'm still sort of in the room to them, but a little less.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: And after a day, I'm a lot less in the room. and so they're sort of noting time time passing by the changeability of smells wow that is kind of beautiful and also kind of sad i don't know imagining you fading slowly out of a room it feels like a very different type of thing to experience yeah maybe i i haven't ever thought of it as sad i mean in a way it's there's something reassuring in the fact and maybe even alarming, I suppose, but that I'm still here when I'm not here for them, right?
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: And that when I come home and I've pet another dog or I've had some experience which might potentially leave an odor on my clothes, that they can kind of experience that by just smelling me and seeing where I've been. To me, that's kind of extra neat, not melancholy.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: You know, a lot of the people we've heard from in this episode, they talk about this ability to understand their dog and this connection they have. And then talking to Holly, talking to you, we're actually just really different from dogs.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: We can connect with dogs. We have these points of overlap. We can have relationships. But we are clearly extremely, extremely different. What does that difference mean to you? Do you find that difference exciting? Do you find that difference daunting?
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: I mean, as an experimenter, I do find it daunting that they're quite different than we are perceptually and therefore probably cognitively, but also exciting, right? There's a lot of possibilities, a lot of things we can investigate and learn.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: As a person who lives with dogs, there's the mystery of it, the mystery of what it's like to be a smelling creature. and how we kind of get, even though there's this fundamental difference between us, we coexist and seem to share a lot of things, at least share space during the day, right? Share a life.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: I find that mystery kind of delightful and I don't try to solve it in my ordinary life.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: You know, we've been hearing from listeners about whether they understand their dogs and a lot of them are like, yeah, totally. And I wonder, you know, you're someone who understands exactly how much we don't understand our dogs.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: But I'm also curious, do you think you understand your dogs? Oh, no. Uh-uh. Definitely not. I mean, I don't think I do, and I don't know how anybody could, really.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: But, you know, they're familiar to me. and we use all the anthropomorphic words that everybody uses to talk about our sense of whether they're feeling depressed or grumpy or proud or whatever but that's just a gloss for me.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: I don't really know what they're like and what their feelings are at any moment and whether they choose to stay with me if they had an option. It's a very puzzling thing living with dogs and I'm okay with that.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: As a scientist, I think I've just grown more and more agnostic. You know, I just feel like I know less and less in some ways because I see how much more I didn't even imagine was out there.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: And that's delightful to me. Yeah, it's not to me about pinning it down and saying, well, now we have the answers. I mean, what's the fun in that? then something that's pinned down and sort of completely understood, you'd put that away. You know, I like that knowledge is ever elusive. Kind of like a dog. At least one that doesn't come when you call.
--:-- Alexandra Horowitz: Yeah. Let the cat. Let the dog in. Let the cat out, let the cat in, let the dog out, let them both in.
--:-- [Theme music plays]
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: This episode was produced by Miles Bryan. It was edited by our executive producer Miranda Kennedy and Noreen Khan. Fact-checking by Melissa Hirsch. Engineering by Patrick Boyd.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: And before we let you go, we want to ask about AI friendships. Do you have regular conversations with your friends known as ChatGPT or Quad or Gemini? We're not talking intimate relationships. But if you do have regular chats with some kind of LLM, we want to hear from you. Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I'm Noam Hassenfeld. This is Explain It To Me. And once again, meet the beagles. I'm hungry. Kitchen's dirty. Clean the kitchen. Wash the dishes. Cook some breakfast. Wash the dishes. Let the dog in. Let the cat out. Let the dog in, let the cat out. Let the cat in, let the dog out. Let him roll.
