The Neuroscience of Dog Training- Kathy Murphy

[Beanwood]

This has to be one of my favourite, geeky yet so easy to listen to podcasts, perfect for a rainy day! I really like the way Kathy starts by talking about her journey with Nancy her adopted Rottie,which leads the conversation into mindfulness with dogs and later looking at what we know about biology, breeding, neuroscience.

This is an engaging and fascinating podcast with Nick Benger - a canine dog trainer and behaviourist based in Bristol. He has his own podcast channel HERE

Kathy Murphy talks to Nick Benger .....

"In this podcast we spoke about how Kathy became interested in dog training through her Rottweiler Nancy, the effects of genetics vs environment on behaviour and mindfulness in dogs"

Kathy Murphy with Nick Benger talking about the Neuroscience of Dog Training

 

[snowbunny]

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'll try to have a listen to her this week.

I'm not personally a fan of Nick Benger, but he does have some great guests on his podcast!

 

[Peartree]

Thank you for posting this Beanwood. I found it very interesting especially the last half hour when she talked about how the brain chemistry can change.

 

[Joy]

Thanks for this @Beanwood . I thought it took a while to get going but some interesting insights that have led me to thinking about a dog's response to cues.

The standard IMDT view is that if a dog doesn’t follow a cue then they either don’t understand what you want or they aren’t motivated to do it, and I have accepted this as true. But following the podcast I wonder whether it is rather more nuanced than that.

Molly is rarely ‘disobedient’ in the sense that she understands what I want her to do but deliberately chooses not to do so – so in IMDT terms ‘unmotivated’. However I do get occasions when she just doesn’t seem to register the cue – a case in point being her failure to sit at one station on our recent rallyonline entry. Of course I know that we talk about needing to proof against distractions, but I’ve always envisaged ‘distractions’ as being competing things in the environment that the dog might find more rewarding than whatever the human is offering and therefore the dog might consciously choose the distraction. I am now re-conceptualising ‘distractions’ as things in the environment that cause the dog to literally use the neural pathway that the dog would otherwise use to respond to the cue. So the dog’s distracted state is an involuntary reflex. (In our video it might possibly have been the wind rattling the roof.)
Or is it that the dog's emotional response tot he distraction 'trumps' the reasoned response - the amygdala taking precedence over the frontal cortex??

So to counter-act this maybe I need to make sure Molly’s mind is on me (perhaps by ensuring she is looking at me?) before I give a cue. Or perhaps I need to condition each cue in the same way that I have with her whistle recall, so that it becomes an instinctive response. I think I’m right in saying that an instinctive or emotional response uses a different part of the brain or neural pathway than a reasoned response? I’m not at all sure about the science of this so would welcome any comments.