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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 2, Number 6 Dogs and Love, Part 3 by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR February
11, 2008 One
of my favorite hobbies is trying to understand my dog. I want to grasp
what might be going on in his mind and feelings and thus to get a sense of
where his experience is alien
to mine and where it is similar. Unlike, say, marathon running or stamp
collecting, this is a hobby without clearly-defined parameters, actions,
or metrics for success, but I find it compelling nonetheless. Humans and
dogs are based on the same digital language and live in the same
environment; the overlap between Them
and Us is thus natural and large – but so is the divide, as watching a
dog exercise its amazing sense
of smell is enough to make clear. I
am not the only one fascinated by the inner life of dogs. A few years ago,
news stories appeared about work by Patricia
Simonet suggesting that dogs
laugh; the panting you hear when your dog is playing (even before it
has exercised much) is, Simonet believes, a form of laughter.
"Laughter" seems off the mark to me as a description here; I
would instead call the behavior "happy panting" because the dog
is clearly in a happy state of relaxed but energetic play. The dog does
not appear to be laughing at anything, however. True, laughter
has a fairly broad definition, and of course what the dog is actually
experiencing is likely not quite the same as any
human experience. Still, when Zoomer and I play, his panting suggests
excited happiness to me, not laughter. -
- - - - Recent
articles about the human propensity for mental time travel remind me that
dogs are in
the present far more than we are. Human brains are constantly
wandering away from the present as we relive old experiences and try out
possible futures in the safety of our minds. The survival advantage of
being able to roam through time this way is obvious. Less obvious is that
parts of the brain involved in reliving the past and modeling the future
are active almost all the time in humans; time travel is the default
mode of the human brain according to Harvard psychologists Daniel
Gilbert and Randy Buckner. The areas of the brain that light up during
time travel go dark only when we are in the present, which, it turns out,
is rarely. As Gilbert and Buckner put it, "It is only when the
environment demands our attention – a dog barks, a child cries, a
telephone rings – that our mental time machines switch themselves off
and deposit us with a bump in the here and now. We stay just long enough
to take a message and then we slip off again to the The
"in the present" nature of dogs (and cats and other animals) is
a big part of their charm and fascination; it is part of what makes
animals seem spontaneous and genuine. Unlike adult humans, your dog is
mostly here instead of
wandering somewhere else in time. Because your dog doesn't have the mental
horsepower – the computing power, really – to model the future and the
past in the detail that humans do, he not only lives in the present more
fully but notices and appreciates the present more than he otherwise would.
This is one reason, presumably, that life seems so vivid for dogs; another
reason is the dog's relative lack of emotional repression. Dogs (and other
animals) are strongly connected to not only the present but to their
feelings – chained to the
present and to their feelings, one might say, even when they might rather
escape. Humans have the mental tools in their vastly-larger brains to
remove their own conscious selves from the present and to block or
suppress their own feelings; given enough trauma early in life, this
ability to block feeling becomes set in stone as the walls of repression
harden into neurosis. At that point, the person is denied full experience
of not only the original traumas but of feelings generally. Less early trauma thus allows for a more vivid
and more loving later life; one must be able to feel in order to love. It
would be interesting to know if the level of repression someone exhibits
is correlated with the amount of time travel of the type Gilbert and
Buckner are measuring in the brain; does less trauma early in life lead to
an adulthood with more time spent in the present? It would also be
interesting to chart the ability for time travel as it develops
in the human brain; the levels and quality of activity in the "dark
networks" surely change from neonatal life on through infancy,
childhood, and into adulthood. Modern
humans spend a disproportionate amount of time not only outside the present but also mired in our bizarrely-powerful
upper-brain intellect. In this
more abstract environment, deep feeling – the foundation of experience
and the cornerstone of love – recedes into the shadows. Dogs and other
animals are a reminder of the importance of feeling and of living in the
present when we can. A loving early life improves our adult ability
to love (and perhaps to live in the present); in turn, this healthier
state gives us a sense of empathy for others including a natural respect
for their rights and freedoms. The
love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of
ourselves. ~
William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)
Zen
Master Zoomer as a Young Child (12 weeks old), in the Present and Open to
Feeling The Paradise Perspective will return on February 25. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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