During the NDT Conference many questions came up which begged further explanations but time was short and everything couldn’t be pursued to its logical conclusion. So in order to tie up some loose ends, and because it can prove difficult to correlate the hands on practical work with the schematics of the model, I offer […]

There’s much I have to say about my experiences at the first annual Natural Dog Training Conference in Battleground, Indiana but first THANK YOU. THANK YOU to Dr. Jean Marie Thompson for putting the idea and the event together. THANK YOU to the entire Indiana Indiana K-9 Assisted Crisis Response team (Scott, Tim, Carol, Angie, […]

“Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world, whether foraging for food or attracting a waiter’s attention. Indeed, all communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is mediated via the motor system.” Daniel Wolpert Phd. http://cbl.eng.cam.ac.uk/Public/Wolpert/WebHome To repeat, full emotional conductivity is moving without restriction. This kind of movement is […]

Consciousness is energy, its interface with nature is emotion, and like energy consciousness as emotion moves as a wave. These waves are physically embodied as emotional affects (butterflies in the stomach, chill up the spine, queasy feeling, wobbly in the knees, shortness of breath, sense of weightlessness, flow, resonance, etc., etc.); affects that evolved in […]

“Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world, whether foraging for food or attracting a waiter’s attention. Indeed, all communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is mediated via the motor system. Taking this viewpoint, the purpose of the human brain is to use sensory signals to determine future actions.” […]

        What Goes On Out There…………..   ……………………..Begins In Here    

http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/5-tall-tales-from-1-small-mind/ “I am an occasional visitor to the Natural Dog Training (is there such a  thing as Supernatural Dog Training?) blog authored by snake-oil salesman and new-age mystic Kevin Behan. Reading the blog is amusing and infuriating. I find it painful to see him lie to readers and distort the latest science story to support the sales his […]

While I do not expect an interesting dialogue to emerge from this post/counter-post exchange with the Unknown Scientist, http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/5-tall-tales-from-1-small-mind/ I nevertheless welcome the opportunity to rub my theory up against the mainstream in order to render some important distinctions that can help bring the emotional dynamic into sharper relief and hopefully make the effort worthwhile […]

The Unknown Scientist: “I get the feeling that he doesn’t even read the articles he links to. Did he miss this?” “Once flowers hide away their pollen this way, natural selection favors bees that can give the flowers a harder shake. The harder the bees shake, Dr. Vallejo-Marín and his colleagues have found, the more […]

http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/5-tall-tales-from-1-small-mind/ POINT THREE: Resource Holding Potential   Animal Behavior Desk Reference – A Dictionary of Animal Behavior Ecology and Evolution 2nd ed – Barrows (CRC 2005) An individual organism’s potential for obtaining, or retaining, a resource based on its fighting ability [coined by Parker 1974 in Maynard Smith 1976, 44]. An individual organism’s potential for […]

http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/5-tall-tales-from-1-small-mind/ “Natural selection favored the dogs that did a better job of figuring out the intentions of humans.” We run across this kind of statement all the time in the discussion on dogs. It’s supposed to serve as a powerful locomotive hauling a long logic train up Argument mountain, but it always stops me dead […]

http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/5-tall-tales-from-1-small-mind/ The Unknown Scientist: “Mr. Behan reaches new heights in ignorance of evolution when he reworks the creationist lament, “Why ain’t monkeys turning into humans?” He puts his own spin on it by asking: “why then haven’t domesticated versions of foxes and coyotes, not to mention other dump scavengers such as rats, bears, raccoons, skunks, crows, […]

The body does more than carry the head around. http://theweek.com/article/index/246703/the-worm-that-regrows-its-head-and-memories-when-decapitated Also note in the article below, the bee in its relationship to the flower is described as a tuning fork, so that its body resonates with the shape of the flower and accelerates it so as to vibrate and release its essence, i.e. pollen. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/science/unraveling-the-pollinating-secrets-of-a-bees-buzz.html?ref=science […]

I didn’t attend either the conference linked below or log onto its streamed content Society for the Promotion of Applied Research in Canine Science (SPARCS). but Eric Brad wrote a good overview of his experiences there– http://lifeasahuman.com/2013/pets/dogs-the-best-friend-we-hardly-know/ Since I’m familiar with the work of the various speakers I feel qualified to make the following comments. […]

Russell has introduced us to the power of Control Theory, and in this video one can witness it being put into expression as the complex coordinated behavior of quadcopters.   http://www.ted.com/talks/raffaello_d_andrea_the_astounding_athletic_power_of_quadcopters.html I would like to add that underneath the algorithms, sensors and computer processing of these remarkable machines is an even more fundamental and even […]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201208/rank-and-dominance-matter-when-trying-teach-dogs In this article Dr. Coren talks about an experiment wherein one dog watches another dog solve a problem and the observing dog copies the problem-solving dogs’ successful actions if as Dr. Coren puts it, the problem solving dog has a high social rank. Dr. Coren interprets this experiment as verification that whatever we human […]

http://tv.greenmedinfo.com/jaw-dropping-impossible-feat-of-balance/ Here in my view, is an incredible example of what makes a human being human, or I should say, adaptive. The capacity to feel the midpoint, AS A POINT. Nothing could be more obvious that the practitioner in this video can feel perhaps on the level of the nanoscale, the absolute center-of-gravity of each […]

(Roger Kethcart, in this treatment of the relationship between dog and man turns to Hollywood to demonstrate the degree of emotional rapport that exists between our two species.) Have you ever had a rough day at work, only to find your dog, somehow sensing your angst, being even more affectionate when you get home?  Or […]

Question: If wolves hunt in packs—and if hunting begat the dog—why don’t free ranging dogs live in packs? Answer: Dogs don’t form functional packs because dogs were domesticated from wolves. The fact that free ranging dogs don’t form working packs is cited by proponents of dog-as-scavenger theory and modern learning theorists as evidence that dogs […]

Thanks to Russell for calling my attention to the following. I post it here as a companion piece to my last post http://naturaldogtraining.com/blog/the-trees-in-our-forest/ “Clouds In The Head” May 21, 2013 in Neuroscience Many brain researchers cannot see the forest for the trees. When they use electrodes to record the activity patterns of individual neurons, the […]

Modern behaviorism is heavily weighted toward neuroscience. In neuroscience, a researcher becomes particularly excited when they detect a single neuron firing in response to a given stimuli. They then trace the route of the impulse as it travels through the brain in the hopes of parsing the circuitry down to the finest grain of resolution. […]

Leah asks if the video below of synchronizing metronomes is akin to the trampoline analogy I offered recently. To repeat, a trampoline is analogous to consciousness as both are a displaceable medium, i.e. when stimulated an organism is induced into sensations of disequilibrium. So two people standing and especially moving on a trampoline displace the […]

In order to understand why dogs do what they do I believe that one must first realize that a profound error is made by projecting human thoughts onto animal behavior. At some point it just clicks that transposing the human intellectual capability of comparing one point-of-view to another point-of-view, or one moment-in-time to another moment-in-time […]

http://www.wimp.com/throwstick/ Does this dog need its head examined, or does this video reveal something profound about the nature of information? Modern ethologists, behaviorists and many trainers argue that dogs and wolves organize into social structures according to a rational calculation relative to gaining control over resources. Supposedly dogs compute a cost/benefit analysis, while taking in […]

  <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/science/ may-britt-and-edvard-moser-explore-the-brains-gps.html>.             A husband and wife team of neuroscientists, May Britt and Edvard Moser, have discovered “Grid cells” in the brains of rats, and these cells undoubtedly exist in all animals. As a rat moves, these cells track its movement and create a grid like pattern as a […]

http://lenski.com/blog/conflict-pain-and-dog-beneath-desk/?fb_source=pubv1 Conflict pain and the dog beneath the desk “A friend was sitting at her desk, her beloved lab at her feet. Suddenly, the dog yelped and looked up at her. This happened several more times, the dog’s gaze becoming increasingly more accusatory. Finally, he got up and left the room. Later, she learned the […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/science/picking-up-infants-calms-by-slowing-heart-rates.html?ref=science&_r=0 This research uncovers an almost instantaneous calming response in the heart rates of young mammals and babies when comforted by another. Adults on the other hand cannot calm so quickly. This calming response is an intricate interplay between the nervous, MOTOR (emphasis added) and cardiac systems. My theory is that this calming response manifested […]

“From his previous research, Dr. Hare has argued that dogs evolved their extraordinary social intelligence once their ancestors began lingering around early human settlements. As he and his wife, Vanessa Woods, explain in their new book, “The Genius of Dogs,” natural selection favored the dogs that did a better job of figuring out the intentions […]

“nothing besides the laws of nature are needed to explain intelligence” http://www.insidescience.org/content/physicist-proposes-new-way-think-about-intelligence/987 Excuse my caps but THE ONLY THEORY OF COGNITION THAT DOES NOT NEED TO BE REVISED…..is NDT. Emotion makes organisms feel just as if they are gravitationally and electromagnetically charged particles of consciousness (through the interplay of the Central Nervous and the Enteric […]