Animals sometimes show love in ways most of us don’t instantly recognise.
For instance, your cat may stretch to show you they missed you, or headbutt you as a typically antagonistic form of affection.
Dogs who rob your favourite shoes might have a secret devoting agenda, too.
But while you might recognise some forms of fondness, like looking into your dog’s eyes, more easily, a new study has shown that you may not realise the intensity of the act.
The paper, published last Wednesday, found that “inter-brain correlations in frontal and parietal regions dramatically increased… during mutual gaze” between people and their dogs.
What does that mean?
It means that you may be literally “in sync” with your pet’s brain when you make eye contact with each other.
Activity in the frontal and parietal parts of the brain is associated with focus and emotional engagement in humans.
We knew this became activated when owners pet or pay attention to their dogs, but we didn’t know until this study was released whether or not pets’ brains reacted in the same way.
The recent research, published in Advanced Science, found that dog and human brains seem to mirror each other during interactions like petting.
But their inter-brain connection was even stronger when the owner petted the dog while making eye contact with them.
“Joint attention contributes to the interbrain activity coupling between dogs and humans,” they found. Their findings seemed to suggest dogs follow our lead in this neural exchange, rather than the other way around.
Does that just apply dogs?
No. Multiple studies have found that “being on the same wavelength” as someone you care for is a real thing ―neural waves synchronise between a musician and their audience as they play, for instance.
Some experts chalk that down to both parties being present during the same experience.
But others, like neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley, think it’s a little deeper than that.
“When we’re talking to each other, we kind of create a single überbrain that isn’t reducible to the sum of its parts,” Wheatley told Scientific American during her search to find the scientific source of that “something special”.
“Like oxygen and hydrogen combine to make water, it creates something special that isn’t reducible to oxygen and hydrogen independently.”