Sam Talks About...

The debate between whether cats or dogs make better pets has been raging for years, I wouldn't be surprised if ancient wars were waged because one emperor was a dog lover and another was a cat lover.  Thankfully, scientists have weighed in and have studied what cats and dogs really think of us.  In one  study , scientists trained 12 dogs to lie still in an MRI machine and measured the brain's response to the scents of a familiar human, strange human, familiar dog, strange dog and itself. The method used is called functional magnetic resonance imaging and uses the differences in the magnetic properties of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood to look at where oxygenated blood is going to in the brain. An increase in oxygenated blood is thought to indicate an increase in brain activity in that area. They looked at a region of the brain called the caudate nucleus, which is highly linked to positive expectations and reward.  This is part of how they trained the dogs Th