A dog is man’s best friend, yes, but what about man’s best…twin? Well, it’s not out of the question, as it turns out. A study published earlier this year collected various data that tells us dogs do indeed look like their owners.
The study, “Like owner, like dog–A systematic review about similarities in dog-human dyads,” was published by scholars Yana Bender, Franziska Roth, Stefan Schweinberger, Simone Witte, and Juliane Brauer in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Dogs have been part of humans’ lives for over 30,000 years, and in that time “have evolved special social-cognitive abilities that have allowed the dog and human bond to exist in the shape as we know it today,” the study shares. Due of this, “there is a tendency of dogs as a species becoming increasingly similar to the humans in some aspects, allowing for better cooperation between them.” This happens with behavior, but, in its own way, it also happens with appearance–though on the part of the human.
When a human selects a dog, studies have shown that the human is more likely to choose a dog, whether consciously or not, that resembles them in some way. Per the study, this is known as the “Similarity Because of Choice hypothesis,” where “dogs and humans form a team because of their similarity.” This extends to physical appearance. For example, while participating in a dog-rating study, “women with shorter hair or who wear their hair back mostly tended to rate the breeds Siberian Husky and Basenji (short ears) higher on the dimensions of likeability, friendliness, loyalty, and intelligence,” the study says. The inverse was true for women with long hair, who embraced dogs like the Springer Spaniel and the beagle, both of which are known for their long ears. There was regularly at least some correlation between dog owner and dog appearance throughout the studies researched.
Another fun way to look at this premise is in pop culture. There’s that famous scene in the original 101 Dalmatians for example (above), where Pongo tries to choose a mate for his owner as a parade of women and dogs who closely resemble them walk past their window. There’s also Marvin the Martian fromLooney Tunes and his dog K-9, and even the photography of artist Gerrard Gethings. Gethings’ Do You Look Like Your Dog? series cast models and dogs that look similar to see if people could match them; two were actual dog-and-owner pairs of the 25 sets, however.
But the phenomenon is a real one, and scientifically proven. “There’s actually the psychological phenomenon of humans in general preferring pets or being around people, specifically companionship, around those who resemble themselves,” Psychiatrist Dr. Varsha Radhakrishnan of Tufts University told Boston’s WCVB Channel 5. “So this might actually have something to do with that underlying intuition or drive and desire that we all have to seek something that’s both comforting and familiar.”
So, the next time you take a look at your favorite furry friend, just think—you may also be looking in the mirror.
When was the last time you paid attention to your commute? And I don’t mean a couple of feet in front of you, at the car merging into your lane without a blinker. I mean really paid attention to the route you take.
Did you see the landmarks in the distance that make up the city skyline? Did you drive right past the grocery store you promised to stop by at the corner of this Peachtree Street or that Peachtree Street, a struggle Atlanta locals know well?
“Oops! Force of habit,” you might say to yourself as you miss your turn and begin to think about when and where you can turn around.
Relying on familiarity can either facilitate or impede daily navigation. As a researcher studying memory and navigation, I aim to understand how the brain supports spatial navigation and what happens if the cognitive mechanisms for choosing the best route home begin to decline, such as during stress or with aging.
Humans are creatures of habit – at least that’s what people tell themselves when wary of trying something new. But what if a new route is faster or safer than the one you usually take? Would you try it?
Research from my team suggests that people balance between exploration and habit – that is, trying something new or sticking with the familiar – when deciding what route to take. Which navigation strategy someone chooses depends not only on their spatial abilities but on their network of brain regions that support navigation.
Spatial navigation refers to the cognitive ability that helps you travel from one location to another. It may sound simple, but it requires using cognitive functions such as memory, attention, decision-making and assessing potential rewards – never mind the ability to simply perceive the environment itself.
For example, you might retrieve an episodic memory about a specific event: remembering a detour you took a week ago to drop a package off at the post office, including the traffic and weather that day.
You might also retrieve a semantic memory that’s more factual and knowledge-based: remembering how many blocks away the post office is from the park and the turns you need to make to get there.
Together, these kinds of memory inform your spatial memory, which allows you to retrieve location information. This could be where buildings are in relation to each other or where objects are situated in your house. Spatial memories help form your cognitive map, which is essential for getting around in the world.
Often, these different ways of remembering interact, and you can use one type of memory to inform the other. For example, you’ve become accustomed to your commute to work and know it’s relatively short (semantic memory), but over the past three days you’ve been arriving late due to heavy traffic (episodic memory), so you choose to take a different route next time.
Research from my team has found that disagreements in your brain over possible routes can happen. Different types of memory can come up with different solutions for what route you can take, and this conflict is a big factor in how hard your brain needs to work when navigating an environment.
Responding to new and familiar memories
Habits stem from what researchers call stimulus-response memories. These include the knee-jerk reaction you might have to familiar landmarks – when you perceive these places, your brain signals you to make a turn along your commute without needing to consciously think about it.
Habits are rigid, but they can also be beneficial: By taking care of the navigation for you, habit frees up your brain to have a conversation with someone or plan what to make for dinner when you get home.
When navigating less familiar routes or environments, where habit doesn’t kick in automatically, you rely on brain regions such as the hippocampus to call on detailed memories from recent experiences to help guide the way.
But let’s say you’re shopping at a new grocery store where most things are where you expect them to be, even though you’ve never been in this particular store before. What happens when your brain experiences both something new and something familiar about an environment?
Researchers have shown that when something about an environment is familiar and aligns with your prior experiences, the prefrontal regions of your brain – those responsible for executive functions such as decision-making – become more active. They can bypass or even inhibit your hippocampus’s ability to form new memories about specific events.
In other words, your brain can weave information about a new experience into your database of existing knowledge, rather than storing it as completely new information with little relation to the past. This process may help fast-track your understanding about new experiences.
Updating cognitive maps
Researchers know that cognitive maps of the environment depend on the hippocampus and its database of memories about specific events. However, I and other researchers argue these maps can also function as a schema – a collection of memories made up of associations between environmental details. You can add new information to these collections and use it to infer new relationships.
Say a new pedestrian bridge is built between the park and the post office. Your brain can more easily weave this new route information into your existing memories compared with learning a new environment from scratch. Similarly, if you just moved to a new town and know very little about the spatial layout, you might rely on your past experiences of towns to infer where something is.
Using neuroimaging techniques as well as virtual reality programs designed to test a participant’s ability to navigate different routes, my team found that there is likely an interdependent relationship between the brain areas that store memories of specific events and areas that store related information across memories when planning to navigate less familiar places.
New routes are more difficult to follow when they differ from your prior experiences. Thus, a stronger schema helps integrate your knowledge of the spatial relationships between locations and landmarks (such as the distance between the post office and the park) with more general knowledge (such as prior route difficulty). This all informs how you choose to navigate.
Navigating daily life
These memory principles help explain why inconsistencies with your previous experiences can make it so difficult to navigate many aspects of daily life.
Imagine you woke up tomorrow and the GPS on your smartphone was no longer available. How will you plan your route to get to your destination?
You might be used to navigating north from your home to the grocery store – but have you ever tried to navigate to that grocery story from a different location? It’s much harder!
Relating new information to your prior experiences may help strengthen your schema and make navigation easier. And understanding what processes the brain needs to go through to solve these navigation problems can help you understand why getting around can be challenging.
When these plots are planned — as opposed to letting vacant lots grow wild, which is valuable in its own right — they become extra powerful. You may have even enjoyed one without knowing it: the “pocket garden.” Tucked into spaces accessible to pedestrians, like sidewalks, hospital grounds, and campuses, they can be engineered to turn heat-absorbing concrete into air-cooling oases packed with vegetation and seating for people to escape the metropolitan bustle.
“This increasing prioritization of creating green spaces in unexpected spots and underutilized spaces in communities is not only going to be making our communities more resilient, it’s going to be making people healthier,” said Dan Lambe, chief executive of the nonprofit Arbor Day Foundation, which promotes urban forestry. “A little bit of green goes a long way.”
Pocket gardens aren’t gardens in the agriculturally productive sense, but ornamental grounds, Grist reports. (Though there’s nothing stopping a designer from adding a fruit tree or two.) Ideally, they’re host to native plant species, which bring several benefits. For one, they attract native pollinators like insects and birds, which get a source of food that powers them to go on and fertilize plants elsewhere, like crops in urban farms. And two, if the vegetation is adapted to a particular region or condition, it’s already used to the local climate — drought-tolerant varieties, for instance, won’t require as much water to survive. Furthermore, choosing native grasses that don’t need mowing can cut down on maintenance costs. And picking trees with big canopies will increase the amount of shade for people to use as refuge from the heat. (Sorry, palm trees, that means you’re disqualified.)
Biodiversity — mixing tree species as opposed to planting 10 of the same kind — is key here. That attracts a broader range of pollinating animals, and builds resiliency into the system: If you only plant one variety of tree and a disease shows up, it can spread rapidly.
And speaking of disease, trees have an additional superpower in their ability to scrub urban air of the pollutants that contribute to respiratory problems. In addition, the vegetation of a pocket park releases water vapor, bringing down air temperatures. This mitigates what’s called the urban heat island effect, in which cities absorb the sun’s energy all day and slowly release it into the night. Combined, reduced air pollution and temperatures improve public health.
There’s also the harder-to-quantify bonus of people getting out of their cars and gathering in public spaces, no matter how diminutive. “It’s actually a transition toward the pedestrian — toward the person — and away from the vehicle,” said Eric Galipo, director of campus planning and urban design at the architecture firm FCA, which has integrated pocket gardens in its projects. “We may not spend as much time together as a society as we used to, and so these are great opportunities for that sort of connection to happen.”
When the rains come, these verdant plots take on another role as an infrastructural asset. As the planet heats up, rainfall increases because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. In response, cities like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh are getting rid of concrete to open up more green spaces, which absorb rainfall, allowing it to seep underground. This reduces pressure on sewer systems that are struggling to handle increasingly heavy deluges. These systems, after all, were designed long ago for a different climate than we’re dealing with today.
When a city prioritizes green spaces, you can actually hear the difference. Barcelona, for instance, has been developing superblocks, which aim to improve city life by transforming car infrastructure into walkable spaces. That includes the development of “green axes” (the plural of “axis,” not the tool for chopping), full of vegetation and paths for strolling. A recent study found that after these spaces were pedestrianized and vehicles disappeared, average noise levels fell by 3.1 decibels. (For context, hearing a car traveling at 65 mph from 25 feet away would be 77 decibels.)
While 3.1 may not seem like much, each increase of 10 decibels means a tenfold rise in loudness. And we have to consider not just the decibels but how the kind of noise changed as Barcelona developed green axes: Revving engines, honking horns, and even the occasional cacophony of a car accident were replaced with voices. As the built environment dramatically changed, so too did the way that folks on foot experienced their surroundings. “If people see green in general, the noise perception tends to change,” said Samuel Nello-Deakin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and lead author of the study. “You think that things are not as noisy as they actually are. So there’s also this interesting interaction, right, between sort of what you hear and what you see.” In addition, green spaces absorb city racket, keeping it from bouncing off of and between buildings and pavement, insulating residents from the din.
With less commotion comes still more gains to public health. Noise pollution is an invisible crisis worldwide, as studies link the stress it causes not just to struggles with mental health, but physical problems like hypertension and heart disease. By contrast, pocket parks and other green spaces encourage people to ditch their cars and move their bodies. “There are also physical health benefits from walking, biking, and being outside that over a lifetime tend to have a cumulative positive effect on what our society spends in health care,” Galipo said.
So as cities increasingly realize and utilize the power of greenery, the environmental, auditory, and social fabric of the urban landscape transforms. “There’s a gravity to this green space that brings people out,” Lambe said. “And all of a sudden, neighbors are connecting, generations are connecting, cultures are connecting. Trees are about the one thing that everybody can agree on.”
Your goofy but lovable cousin just told you that you should stop eating eggs because he read somewhere that a study showed they are bad for you.
How much should you trust your relative on such matters? More importantly, how much should you rely on one newly published bit of research when deciding what to make for breakfast?
To be clear, this is not an article about the health-promoting or health-torpedoing properties of eggs. It’s about how scientific knowledge is built piece by piece from many studies. What scientists know is refined over time as new results either do or don’t point to the same conclusion.
I’m a geographer who’s been doing and teaching science for many decades, with a sideline of teaching and writing about how science is done. Many people, quite understandably, take a single experiment or study as the be-all and end-all of knowledge because that’s how research often is presented by the press or on social media. But the better way to approach new research is to find how it weaves together with other work on the topic to create big-picture understanding.
Most research studies are undertaken either to fill a gap in our knowledge or to test an existing theory to see whether it deserves the confidence people have in it. After identifying the topic, scientists design a study to achieve those ends. They may run an experiment to learn more about how a chemical affects certain cells, for instance, or collect data in the field to track a natural phenomenon, such as how water temperatures affect hurricanes.
Then the researchers submit their findings to a peer-reviewed journal, where other experts – the scientists’ peers – decide whether it’s quality research deserving of publication.
Not all journals have rigorous peer review. Papers are highly unreliable if published by “paper mills” – journals that appear scholarly but will publish anything if the authors pay a fee.
Peer review doesn’t guarantee that the conclusions are valid, but it increases the chances that they are. Individual papers might be wrong because of honest mistakes, such as unforeseen limitations in the experimental design or, rarely, from outright fraud.
No scientific paper solves a problem once and for all. Neither does it negate all previous research. Well-done research contributes a bit to the scientific community’s understanding of a topic. The next, and crucial, step is putting individual studies in context with other research on the topic.
Even if there is current consensus, a new study may reveal a weakness, and that could lead to more research to figure out what is more likely to be correct. Scientific knowledge is constantly being refined as new information comes to light.
Adding more evidence bit by bit
One question to ask as you consider a particular finding is whether it has been directly replicated, meaning other researchers repeated the experiment to see whether they got the same results. Unfortunately, replication is relatively rare in science; more common are similar studies using comparable data, different methods, or both.
Your confidence can grow when scientists have performed a bunch of related research that’s gone through peer review, been published in scholarly journals and mostly points in the same direction. Of course, if they don’t agree, then your confidence should be weaker.
Sometimes researchers may compile these comparisons in what’s called a systematic review. They may use statistical techniques to perform meta-analysis on data from many different studies at once. Generally speaking, the more good data used to test an idea, the better.
An additional issue is how many studies have been done on a topic. There are thousands of studies on the causes of lung cancer, but there may be only one or two on how a couple of particular genes affect hair loss. Scientists’ confidence in what is known about lung cancer, then, is far greater than what is known about how those genes may have contributed to my baldness.
Appreciating the strength of the evidence is as important as understanding the evidence itself.
Get a helping hand
The idea of expertise has fallen out of favor in some quarters. But experts are vital when it comes to understanding scientific issues. An expert in this sense is someone who has been immersed in the topic for years, knows how to evaluate the relevant studies, and, ideally, has done research on it.
With such a background, an expert is a good judge of how likely any one study is to be wrong. Equally important, they also must try to control the all-too-human impulse to accept what they like and reject what they don’t.
Unfortunately, most people rarely have direct access to experts. The next best thing is someone educated in the general topic – verifiably educated, not someone who browses the internet for a few hours.
Healthcare professionals keep up with the scientific literature in their field so they can provide evidence-based, up-to-date care to patients. Hispanolistic/E+ via Getty Images
Healthcare professionals who have years of training, clinical experience and requirements to keep up with the literature in their field can help you make good decisions based on new medical research. But be careful. You want to rely on someone who updates their recommendations as the state of scientific knowledge evolves, but not someone who latches onto every new outlandish discovery.
In practice, some healthcare practitioners – hopefully a small minority – are not trustworthy on such matters. If someone is selling you something that sounds too good to be true, assume that it is. They may even have a financial or personal stake in their recommendation.
Consider the source
You should retain some skepticism about what you read in the popular press and even more about what you see on social media.
A good journalist who knows how to assess new studies can act as a guide and help you understand scientific issues. You’re looking for journalists who can accurately and objectively report on new research and help put it in context with what else is known. Unfortunately, there is no list of good versus bad journalists, but general guidance is available, such as that from nonprofit journalism organization The Trust Project.
Journalists who are well versed in how science works can also help you spot whether there are any conflicts of interest at play. Was that study that encourages staying energetic by eating a pound of candy a day sponsored by a snack food company? That would be a major red flag.
I’m not saying that everyone needs to do a thorough literature review before speaking about a scientific issue or deciding whether to eat eggs a couple of times a week. But I do encourage you to adopt a little humility about what you know and understand, along with a realistic appreciation for the limits of both your own knowledge and what the scientific community understands.
And definitely don’t make life-altering decisions based on an article describing one scientific study, even if your cousin tells you to.
