What It's Like to Be a Dog

And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience

By: Gregory Berns

Narrated by: Joe Hempel

Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

What is it like to be a dog? A bat? Or a dolphin? To find out, neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his team began with a radical step: they taught dogs to go into an MRI scanner - completely awake. They discovered what makes dogs individuals with varying capacities for self-control, different value systems, and a complex understanding of human speech. And dogs were just the beginning.

In What It's Like to Be a Dog, Berns explores the fascinating inner lives of wild animals from dolphins and sea lions to the extinct Tasmanian tiger. Much as Silent Spring transformed how we thought about the environment, so What It's Like to Be a Dog will fundamentally reshape how we think about - and treat - animals. Groundbreaking and deeply humane, it is essential listening for animal lovers of all stripes.

©2017 Gregory Berns (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

"An impressive overview of modern neurology and the still-unanswered issues raised by our treatment of our fellow living creatures." ( Kirkus)

Not much about dogs

This is a good book overall but not very focused on dogs for the majority of the book.

NOT ABOUT DOG

This book is not about dogs. It is about how the brains of different animals work and how their circumstances and their environments shaped them. Different animals many different animals, air, land, and sea.

I did not feel that he actually answered the question, 'What it's like to be a dog?' or any other animal for that matter. He did find out how a given animal uses the structure of its brain to perceive its world. But not what its emotions, social structure, and value systems are, only if it has the bandwidth to have any.

This is a decent enough book if you are into esoteric science written for the laymen.

Please be advised this is
NOT A BOOK ABOUT DOGS.

If it has a brain it can feel and has emotions

What it's Like to be a Dog, And other Adventures in Neuroscience
By Gregory Berns

This book is result of research and study of animal neuroscience. If it has a brain cortex, it has a sense of self and has many other emotional experiences and feelings similar to humans. It’s an expansion of what we know about the non-human species of life on this planet. While brains may be wired differently to support different niches of life, this leads to the differences of the ability to focus and respond to different stimuli. MRI scanner resolution is getting finer and finer and is providing the data that allows us to understand the brain and what it is like to be an animal. We are learning how much consciousness and self-awareness that animals have and are close to being able to completely simulate and thus understand what it’s like to be a dog or other animal. If we find that animal brains have the same emotional and self-awareness of humans, then what do we do, and how do we change. And, what does this say for the evolution of mankind.

Spoiler: no one knows yet, but the neuroscientists are pretty close. Also dogs are people too.

interesting read.

worth listening to if you have an interest in animal behavior or neurobiology.

very informative

I only half liked the book. It is very detailed and offers lots of science, but because it's full of technical information I thought it was a little dry. I was bored with it.

Can be difficult to follow

The book can get very technical which can make this hard to follow in an audiobook. Less about what it’s like to be a dog than what it took to put many animals (and brains) in an MRI machine.

Overall, there is good information about animal (including dogs) sentience, ability to experience and to suffer, and what that might mean to how we treat animals and our world.

What It's Like To Be A Neuropsychology Researcher

Very, very little insight into dogs' minds. Does contain many neat descriptions of creative experiments, and lots of love for animals in general. But I am no longer a graduate student in psych; I want to learn more about how dogs think.

There were a few true pearls, but that's all. To give you even one example would be to critically reduce the supply of them.

Parts are Good

I liked a lot of the parts of this book but it did not hold my attention all the way through. I kept checking to see how much of the book was left.

Fascinating!

I was captivated by this compelling blend of hard science and deeply moving stories. Deeply admire Bern's and his work. Highly recommended!