Extreme closeup of Kuiper's nose. He is asleep.

Do dogs dream of…actual sheep?

“Science doesn’t purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.” Isaac Asimov (science fiction author), Interview by Bill Moyers (1988)

Kuiper is about to get a surprise because it turns out that being his pillow all day doesn’t pay the bills. I need to get up and go to work.

Do dogs dream like we do? It may seem obvious based on the squeaking and kicking they sometimes do, but how would we know for sure? What might they dream of? In 2001, a study about rat dreams was published in the journal Neuron. The researchers trained the rats to run on a circular track while they recorded their brain patterns. Later, they also recorded their brain patterns while they were asleep.

They saw a strong correlation between the brain patterns of running on the track and the brain patterns during REM. The correlation was so strong that they could even tell what part of the track the rats were likely dreaming about. When they changed up the track a little bit, they also noticed a corresponding change in both the awake and asleep patterns.

Daniel Magoliash of the University of Chicago did a similar study on songbirds in 2000. He said, “The zebra finch appears to store the neuronal firing pattern of song production during the day and reads it out at night, rehearsing the song and, perhaps, improvising variations. The match is remarkably good.”

Given this information, what do you think your dog dreams about?

Original post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BZ5N2zfAgEC/

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