“It’s absolutely brilliant, groundbreaking research,” says Pascal Belin, a neuroscientist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, who was part of the team that identified the voice areas in the human brain in 2000. “They’ve made the first comparative study using nonhuman primates* of the cerebral processing of voices, and they’ve done it with a noninvasive technique by training dogs to lie in a scanner.”      [*I think that's an error; dogs are not primates.]

OK, we don't need an fMRI scanner to know that dogs recognize our voices and our emotional states and can tell when we're happy, sad, upset, angry, dissembling, lying, or cheating on our taxes, but it IS fascinating to learn that they have the same voice areas in their brains that we do, and it's really cool that you can train a dog to sit still in an MRI machine (I've heard they're really LOUD and noisy). 

"So the team trained 11 dogs to lie motionless in a functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scanner, while wearing headphones to deliver the sounds and protect their ears. “They loved doing this,” Andics says, adding that the pooches’ owners were there to reward them with treats and petting. The scanner captured images of the dogs’ brain activity while they listened to nearly 200 dog and human sounds, including whines, cries, playful barks, and laughs. The scientists also scanned the brains of 22 human subjects who listened to the same set of sounds. Both dogs and humans were awake during the scans."

But you'll note in the cute photo (link below) that only labs, retrievers and border collies are shown.  If they'd included some really smart dogs, who knows what they might have discovered?

Maybe it would be just too scary to know what's going on in a corgi mind...

scim.ag/dogvoice