Role of pet dogs for our brain

We humans, keep meeting people throughout our lifespan. We make connections, we lose them. Also, some humans make connections with materialistic things. But all these connections last just for a particular time due to the effect they create on our life.

Human behavior always tends to make permanent connections where they get happiness and loyalty. Many types of research and studies have shown that a bond between human-animal is more strong compared to human-human. This is because humans sometimes tend to be selfish at times but animals don’t.

The most prominent bond between humans-animals is the bond between humans and pet dogs. We are aware that dogs always show loyalty, honesty, and care toward their human friend.

Talking about a friend, Dogs are not just pets. They just become like a friend. They play, they care, and they share as we human friends do.

A recent study revealed that dogs can smell stress. Apart from their sniffing skills, they can do so because they connect to humans in such a way.

Read this: Dogs can smell stress

Dogs always show selfless love to humans. They help humans to overcome mental health issues. If we want to learn what it means to love and care selflessly, let’s just look at dogs. They are a perfect example of this.

New research reveals that viewing, feeling, and touching real dogs leads to higher levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This research is published in PLOS ONE and was led by Rahel Marti at the University of Basel in Switzerland. The prefrontal cortex is relevant because it is responsible for the regulation and processing of social and emotional interactions.

These findings have implications for animal-assisted clinical therapy. This is so because interacting with dogs helps people to cope with stress and depression issues. According to the researchers, understanding this brain activity will help clinicians to enhance systems for animal-assisted therapy.

During this study, the researchers examined the activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. They measured this activity with infrared neuroimaging technology. The research involved 19 men and women. Each individual viewed a dog. They also petted the dog. These same conditions were performed with Leo. It is nothing but a stuffed lion with filled with a water bottle for matching the temperature and weight of the dogs.

This study resulted that when the individuals interacted with the real dogs, the prefrontal activity was greater. The largest result showed in petting which was considered as the most interactive activity. Secondly, the prefrontal activity of the brain kept increasing every time the individuals interacted with the real dogs. These results were not observed while interacting with Leo.

The authors of this study added: "The present study demonstrates that prefrontal brain activity in healthy subjects increased with a rise in interactional closeness with a dog or a plush animal, but especially in contact with the dog the activation is stronger. This indicates that interactions with a dog might activate more attentional processes and elicit stronger emotional arousal than comparable nonliving stimuli."