Man's best friend actually knows what man is saying, according to a new study out of Hungary on how dogs react to language.
By training 13 family dogs to sit still in an fMRI scanner, the authors of the study discovered that by saying positive words in an excited manner, two different regions of the dog's brain lit up — the left hemisphere, which is connected to the meaning of words, and the right hemisphere, which is connected to how words are emotionally said. The same regions are connected to meaning and intonation in human brains, too.
"Dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant," study author Attila Andics said in a statement.
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Perhaps most fascinating of all, the study shows that processing meaning and emotion in separate hemispheres of the brain before tying them together developed in non-primates long, long before people ever began saying, "Who's a good dog?"
"Using words may be a human invention, but we now see that the neuromechanisms to process them are not uniquely human," Andics said.
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