Bear with me, and consider this scene provided to us by J.R.R. Tolkien:
“Beorn said something to [the dogs] in a queer language like animal noises turned into talk. They went out again and soon came back carrying torches in their mouths, which they lit at the fire and stuck in low brackets on the pillars of the hall about the central hearth. The dogs could stand on their hind-legs when they wished, and carry things with their fore-feet. Quickly they got out boards and trestles from the side walls and set them up near the fire.”
Tolkien probably considered this scene of animals setting up a feast for Bilbo and his companions completely fantastical when he wrote it in The Hobbit. Similarly, the idea of conversing with a dog like Dug in the Disney-Pixar movie Up is wonderful to imagine, but we know that it’s just fiction.
Or is it?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about uplift as it applies to our pets. “Uplift” is a term that applies to the evolution (either natural or engineered) of animals to human-level intelligence and communication ability—think Planet of the Apes or The Island of Doctor Moreau. There is interesting work going on today focused on tapping in to our animals’ intelligence and moving them in our direction. Much of this research is aimed at working dogs—bomb sniffers, search and rescue workers, service companions—but the results will certainly expand out over time to those without jobs.
Georgia Institute of Technology is teaching dogs to talk, in a way. Project FIDO (Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations), sponsored by DARPA, has designed a canine vest furnished with various sensors. Each sensor signifies something different. The dogs are trained to use each in an appropriate context, so that, for example, a bomb sniffing dog cannot only tell its handler that it has found a bomb, it can tell the handler what kind of bomb it is.
In a search and rescue scenario, a dog can be equipped with a vest that includes a GPS transmitter. When the dog locates a person needing assistance, it will activate the sensor for the transmitter, and then stay with the person in need until help arrives. The vest has many applications for use with canine companions who assist people with disabilities.
Moving even closer in the direction of the dog, Dug, in the movie Up, the Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery is working on “No More Woof,” a headset that will translate canine thought patterns and communicate them via short sentences through a microphone. Wow! This is a combination of three technologies: electroencephalography sensors, microcomputing and brain-computer-interface software. Built-in processors analyze the dog’s brain patterns into recognizable feelings like hunger, anger or fatigue. The feelings would be verbalized with sentences like, “I’m hungry” or “What is that?”
While these examples tend to align animals to our way of thinking and communicating, other research is training us to get better at recognizing their ways of receiving messages. Neuroscientists at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary have used MRIs to learn more about how dogs process human communication. They have discovered that canines can process both meaning (left hemisphere of the brain) and voice tone (right hemisphere). This is an interesting finding, but it may be an even more significant achievement getting these dogs to remain still inside an MRI unit, allowing analysis of brain functions while awake!
All of these achievements leave me wondering—who is doing the uplifting? While we teach our pets to think and communicate the way we want them to, we are gaining insight into how they think and communicate.
We may not reach the point where we are like Beorn, and our dogs help us entertain guests by setting tables and serving meals. Still, we are much closer to real communication with our pets than Tolkien probably ever thought we would be. Research is turning what was once strictly fantasy into reality. It’s not a stretch anymore to think about having conversations with our canine family members. I can hardly wait!
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