The smartest dog in the world | 60 Minutes Archive

60 Minutes Rewind Humans have lived with dogs for thousands of years, you would think that after all that time we would have discovered everything there is to know about them, but it turns out that until recently scientists didn't pay much attention to dogs. Dolphins have been studied for decades, apes and chimpanzees too, but the dogs we share our lives with were never thought to be worthy of serious study. As a result, we know very little about what really happens inside dogs' brains. Do they really love us or are they? Dogs simply lick us so they can feed.

How much of our language can they understand? But before you answer, we want you to meet Chaser, who has been called the

smartest

dog in the

world

. Yes, let's go to Wilfred. Good girl, good girl, good girl. John Pilley, retired psychology teacher of one year, and his border collie Chaser are inseparable we're almost there we're almost there you talk you talk you saw Chaser as a family pet like a friend how you see Chase she's our daughter she's a girl She is our daughter, she is a member of the family, yes, she comes first. A lot of people think her dogs are boys, but John Pilley has also been teaching her like a little girl by signing names on toys, okay Chase, Billy has been helping Chaser learn simple words and sentences. kg, he has been teaching her up to five hours a day, five days a week for the past nine years.

My best metaphor is that this is a two-year-old. This is how you think about your dog. A two year old child. Yes he has. the capabilities of a two year old chicken chicken chicken where is the chicken no kidding yeah good girl those tough little two year olds know about 300 words figure eight figure eight good girl that's the vocabulary of the figure eight hunter is three times bigger than the one in the bathtub she has learned the names of over a thousand toys and all those toys add up, yes, but you know, to show us Chaser's collection, Pilly brought us to her back porch, so these are all the toys here.

Yes. Chicken here. Okay, is it there? throw them away please, please do it, there are 800 fabric animals, 116 different balls and more than 100 plastic toys, 1022 toys in total, each with a unique name so that Chaser can recognize the names of each of these toys , that's true, that's true, to prove it. pilly cataloged the toys and then, over the course of three years, gave Chaser hundreds of tests like this Jason finds Circle finds Circle in each test Chaser correctly identified 95 percent or more of the toys the results were published in a magazine peer-reviewed scientific and in a star was born Chaser even got a book deal you too, but John Pilley didn't stop with the names of toys don't kg knows kg knows it nosy good girl taught Chaser that nouns and verbs have different meanings and they can be combined in a variety of ways take the wheel, do it, go, do it well, chase away, take kg, do it well, good girl, good girl, so you are actually understanding the difference between take your paw, put your foot in something and put your nose in something right, and that's what we're showing everyone.

This learning has been possible Pilly says that thanks to a breakthrough that Chaser had when he was just a puppy, at a certain point he realized that objects have names, it was an Insight, it occurred to him how he could know that suddenly he would have that Insight. It was the fifth month and he had learned about 40 names and the time needed to work with her was getting shorter and shorter. She was starting to learn words faster and faster. Yes, it is the closest thing to being in animals that we have seen. what toddlers do while learning words Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, believes Chaser is the most important dog in the history of modern scientific research.

This is a very serious science. We're not talking about stupid pet tricks that people have spent money on. You know, hours of trying to just, you know, train a dog to do the same thing over and over again. The cool thing about what Chaser does is that Chaser is learning tons, literally thousands of new things using the same skill that kids use when learning lots of words. Speaking of what researchers call social inference, an ability that humans like Harrison Luke acquire around the first year. It's okay to demonstrate the concept. The hair hides a ball under one of these two cups.

Hey, look, boy, where is he? You can get it? Can you get the ball? Not Luke. I don't know what cup the ball is in, can you get it, but when his father points, he makes an inference, you got it, so what does that show you? So when kids his age start to understand how to point, that's right when, um, the fundamentals of what leads to language and culture starts to develop, hey, it may seem simple, but when Hair did the same test with bonobos , great apes, studied for over a decade, look what happened, bonobos are closest genetic relatives, you can't do it, you picked the wrong one, but here it was discovered that dogs do.

Are you ready, am I going to hide in one of these two places? This two year old lab named Sisu has no problem understanding the meaning of pointing now he doesn't know for sure which is the right place, there is no way for him to know. and I'm just going to tell you where okay, that's very difficult for a lot of animals and that's what's really special about dogs, is that they're very similar to even human toddlers, that's a level of thinking that people don't really. had. I think the dogs could do the right thing. I mean, there was no evidence until the last decade that dogs were capable of inferential reasoning.

No, that's the new thing. The shocking thing is that of all the species, it is dogs that show a couple of skills that are really important. that allow humans to develop culture and language it is not surprising that dogs share characteristics with humans after all we have evolved together for over fifteen thousand years now there are about 80 million dogs in this country more dogs than children but for everyone playing and petting the company we still know very little about their brains Dr. Greg Burns, a physician and neuroscientist at Emory University, has studied the human brain for more than two decades, but three years ago the questions he had about its dog himself inspired him to start researching.

The canine brain began with the desire to really know what my dog ​​thinks of me. I love my dog, but does he reciprocate in any way when he hears you come home? You know they start to jump. Is it just because they expect you to? feeding them is just a scam dogs our dog they are big scammers yes, to try to answer that question Dr. Burns is doing something that scientists have had difficulty with: he is performing brain scans on dogs while they are awake and without sedation inside of the fmri machine, they are trained to remain completely still.

How hard is it to get a dog to do this? This represents probably three to four months of training, which is why most dogs take that long. What's around Tigger's head here, the scanner generates a lot of noise is quite loud and because the dog's hearing is more sensitive than ours, we have to protect his hearing as well as ours, so we get earplugs and earmuffs and we just wrap it all up to keep it in place. Well, now we go up. Tigger certainly knows the drill which is good once on the machine he lies down and doesn't move these scans are giving Dr.

Burns his first look at how a dog's brain really works so these are slices of the brand Tigger you're looking at, yes, exactly, so we're cutting from top to bottom we analyze them then to see which parts increase in response to the different signals. Well, in the scanner, the dogs sniff cotton swabs with different smells, first the armpit sweat of a complete stranger, then the sweat of their owner, as Dr. Burns expected when the dogs sniffed the swabs, the part of Their brain associated with smell, an area just behind the nose was activated, no matter what the smell was, but it was when the dogs smelled their owner's sweat that another area of ​​the brain was stimulated.

The caudate nucleus or Reward Center, Dr. Burns believes that means the dog is experiencing more than just the good feeling that comes with a meal, shows that the dog is recognizing someone extremely important to him, it is the same area in the human brain that activates when we listen. a favorite song or we anticipate being with someone we love, so just smelling the sweat of its owner triggers something in a much stronger way than with a stranger, which means it is a positive feeling, a positive association and that is something that you can show through MRIs that it's not just I mean, before people would say well, yeah, obviously my dog ​​loves me.

I see him wagging his tail and he seems very happy when he sees me right now. We're using the brain as a kind of test to say it's okay. When we see activity in these reward centers, that means the dog is experiencing something he likes or wants and it is a good feeling. My conclusion from this is that my dog ​​is not scamming me. You saw that? Yes, yes, it worries me. about that all the time the story will continue after this watch YouTube videos of dogs welcoming returning service members home and it's easy to see the bond between dogs and their owners Ryan Hare says there's even more evidence of That bond is found in our bloodstream, we know that when dogs and humans make eye contact, it actually releases what is known as the love hormone, oxytocin, in both the dog and the human, it turns out that Oxytocin, the same hormone that helps new mothers bond with their babies, is released in both dogs and humans when they play. touching or looking into each other's eyes, thank you very much, what we know now is that when dogs really look at you, they essentially hug you with their eyes, really yes, so it's not just that when a dog looks at you a lot. contact with you that they're just trying to get something from you, it's actually probably very enjoyable for them because they get oxytocin or they get an increase in this love hormone as well.

All of these new discoveries about dogs have led Brian Hare to create a science-based website called dognition where owners can learn to play games to test their dog's brain power, thus allowing people to take a brain test. intelligence for your dog that is exactly right and the idea is that there is not just one type of intelligence that we help you measure things like how your dog communicates how empathetic your dog is whether your dog is clever whether your dog is really capable of having abstract thoughts like reasoning, so there are different types of intelligence for dogs, just like humans, absolutely and so some humans are good at English and some are good at math, the same goes for dogs.

Dogs When Hair tried his own dog, a mixed breed named Tassie, he was surprised. Eyes from what I learned, what I discovered was that I had someone sleeping in my bed and I didn't do it. I even really know and I didn't know that my dog ​​doesn't really rely on his working memory so if I say sit and stay I no longer have to wonder why my dog ​​walks away he literally forgot so your dog isn't the one.

smartest

. of the dogs, he did very well in communication, he is very communicative, so basically he could be a television presenter, look what you are saying, yes, bring the shirt, that's the shirt, here we go if you're wondering how it went to Chaser on Brian Harris' IQ test, she was off. graphs about reasoning and memory are not surprising, perhaps considering that Chaser is a Border Collie dog bred specifically for his ability to understand how farmers want their sheep to be herded.

Chaser is like an Einstein of dogs, so it's really fun, Chasers is somehow special and I think the idea actually. It's just no, I mean, when Dr. Pilley chose Chaser, he just randomly picked her out of a litter. What's special is that he spent a lot of time playing these games to help him learn words, but are there a lot of Chasers out there absolutely on your mark? Ready, there will be a lot of people who see this and are jealous of your relationship with Chaser. I mean, now I think about my own dog and think, "wow, I missed the boat." I helped my dog ​​reach his potential.

Well, he starts working more with your dog. Yes, you are so sweet.