After everyone had seen the pictures of the military dogs, the group settled in around the central table.
“If dogs can be trained to jump out of helicopters,” I began, “then surely they can be trained to go into an MRI.”
Andrew nodded. Lisa’s eyebrows crinkled up.
Gavin Ekins was the first to ask the obvious question: “Why would you do that?”
Gavin had been in the lab for two years. After receiving his PhD in economics, he had joined the group to learn about the imaging side of neuroeconomics. I could always count on him to get right to the heart of the matter. He was dogless because of his living situation but had grown up with dogs. He was dating a girl whose role it was to assess the monkeys used in research at Emory for cage compatibility. A monkey matchmaker.
To Gavin’s question, I replied, “To see what they’re thinking.”
“I don’t think you need an MRI to do that,” Gavin said. “It’s ‘Squirrel!’”
That got a good laugh—we were all fans of Pixar’s Up—which of course triggered a round of other what-dogs-are-thinking jokes, centered around food and butt sniffing.
Monica Capra surprised me by being the first in the lab to say this was a good idea. Born and raised in Bolivia, a country ravaged by poor economic policies, Monica had obvious reasons for becoming a professor of economics herself. Unsatisfied with theory, she had gone on to specialize in experimental economics, doing actual tests to verify that people behaved the way other economists said they did. A colleague had introduced us eight years earlier, and because of our mutual interest in decision making, we had hit it off, designing fMRI experiments together ever since.
Monica was a tough cookie, always critical and not shy about poking holes in the ideas of others. Underneath her shell she was a warm person, but she was allergic to dogs. She was the last person in the lab I would have expected to support this.
“People spend an enormous amount of money on their dogs,” she said. “They are important to many people. I think it’s important to figure out why.”
Kristina Blaine, who coordinated all the activities of the lab, voiced her support too, which was strange considering that she lived with four cats.
Sitting next to Monica was Jan Barton. Jan (pronounced yahn) is also from South America, in his case, Argentina. Jan is a professor of accounting. Monica had told him about the kind of research we were doing in the lab, and he had started hanging out with us to figure out how to use neuroimaging in accounting, which was a completely novel application of fMRI and something nobody had done before—always a risk to one’s academic career. Jan had a dog that was on Prozac for anxiety—he just smiled at the idea of scanning dog brains.
Lisa had been deep in thought and said finally, “If we start scanning dogs, does that mean we’ll have dogs in the lab?”
“I guess it does.”
“Yaaayyy!”
I turned to Andrew. There was no way I was going to be able to do this by myself. I still had to teach and supervise the rest of the research projects in the lab. Andrew was the only grad student. This meant he had the most free time to spare. He was also the only person in the lab besides myself who had the necessary technical knowledge about MRI.
“Andrew, do you want to do this?”
“Hell, yeah!”
“Not to rain on the puppy parade,” Lisa said, “but what is the scientific question?”
There are two types of experiments in science: fishing expeditions, where you start collecting data without a clear idea of what the right questions are, and hypothesis-driven experiments, where you start with a specific question to answer. Every middle school student would recognize the latter type as the foundation of the scientific method. Most people think that hypothesis-driven experiments are the only way scientific progress occurs. And science journals strongly prefer hypothesis-driven experiments.
The recipe for the typical hypothesis-driven experiment is simple: Take a well-accepted scientific theory. Find some minuscule aspect of that theory that nobody has ever verified before. Do an experiment that proves that aspect and supports the theory as a whole. Publish.
These experiments make for easy reading and are a surefire way to get results published, building up a résumé that will ensure promotion and tenure at a university. These types of experiments are also popular with funding agencies because the risk of failure is minimal. By my estimate, nearly all published research falls into this arena.
The thing is, hypothesis-driven experiments are incredibly dull. Most of the time you don’t even need to read the experiment to know that the scientists have proven what they basically knew in the first place. If you already have a well-accepted hypothesis, then you already know the most interesting aspects of the scientific question, and the experimental results will, at best, advance knowledge incrementally. Of course, if the hypothesis turns out to be wrong, that would be really interesting. But those results are almost impossible to publish because nobody believes them.
In answer to Lisa’s question, I said, “This is a fishing expedition. It is an idea in search of a question.”
Andrew frowned, clearly troubled by the conflict this would cause with his dissertation research. The standard curriculum of any graduate program in science drills into students the importance of having a clear hypothesis for their research. But I had no hypothesis for the Dog Project. I had no idea how we were going to do this or how long it would take. Frankly, it probably wouldn’t even work.
“Andrew,” I said, “the Dog Project will be high risk. But it’s going to be a blast, and I guarantee you that if it works, we’ll be the first to have pulled it off.”
“I’m in,” he said. “But are we going to have to sedate the dogs?”
“Why would we do that? If they’re sedated, then we won’t know what they’re thinking.”
“So they’ll be completely awake?” Lisa asked.
“They’ll have to be,” I replied. “Just like humans.”
At the time, none of us realized just how much work lay ahead. We didn’t know what the technical difficulties might be, considering dog brains are much smaller than human ones. We hadn’t even begun to think about the actual experiments we might attempt.
At that point, it was all academic. Before we could go any further, we would have to figure out how to train a dog to go inside an MRI.
4
Puppy Steps
EVEN THOUGH CALLIE HAD BEEN in the house for a year, I had not completely warmed up to her.
I wasn’t even sure that I liked her.
Kat knew how much I had loved Newton. When she and the girls went to the animal shelter, they had deliberately picked a dog that was about as different from a pug as you could get. Callie was the anti-pug. Pugs are short, stocky, and slow. Callie was a lean, mean fighting machine. Her muscles rippled beneath her thin coat.
Where Newton’s face had been fixed in a permanent clownlike expression, Callie’s was always on high alert. Her head was like a periscope, constantly swiveling back and forth in search of prey. Though she was quite friendly, her posture was off-putting to many of the dogs in the neighborhood.
Callie’s strong drive caused endless distress to Helen and Maddy. Whenever Callie killed a chipmunk, the girls would berate her for her cruelty. To make matters worse, Callie wasn’t cuddly. She didn’t like to sit in laps. Sure, she would readily hop on the sofa, but then she would curl up like a cat at the other end—nearby, but not quite touching.