Spot is looking good and moving right along, congratulations are in order, and yet the designers of this doggy robot aren’t concerned about this robot’s ability to outcompete other robots so that it can survive and reproduce, those are problems #100,001 and #100,002 in the evolution of a doggy robot. They are concerned solely with […]

(This is a very, very long post on NDT theory)   Canine body language revolves around the same question that drives much social research, what is the nature of impulse control? I propose that a primal impulse can only be held in check by an impulse of equal primacy. Otherwise an individual will be in […]

After being stimulated by something, the first step in an act of mental apprehension is the phenomenon of emotional projection. The animal projects its physical center of gravity into the form of what it’s attracted to and thus arrives at a feeling. This is the most conservative statement that can be made about the mental lives […]

PBS this week featured two excellent shows on animals. One was a Nature episode about the Turkey man, Joe Hutto, who grafted himself into a flock of wild turkeys and learned their ways. In this new documentary he makes contact with mule deer simply by being among them for two years. http://www.wgbh.org/programs/Nature-26/episodes/Touching-the-Wild-51073 {It seems to […]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2552747/Dogs-lose-jobs-Fred-police-k-9-fired-getting-distracted-job-playing-soda-cans.html I highlight this story for what it can teach us about the power of “ungrounded energy” on a dog’s behavior, the deepest levels of which when abruptly summoned to the surface of awareness, I term “The Charge.” According to learning theory, this dog was trained 100% correctly and I have no doubt it graduated […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/coldblooded-does-not-mean-stupid.html?ref=science&_r=0 The Neo-Darwinian theory holds that a process of natural selection sifted through a huge genetic pool of slightly variable traits and eventually complex social behavior and the capacity to learn emerged in higher species. Driving this evolutionary process is said to be the need, or “urge” of genes to replicate. In the Neo-Darwinian model […]

The science in support of the NDT model comes in faster than I have time to post, and while I’m still trying to catch up on emails, however thanks to Nellie and Lee, some interesting findings bear immediate mention and so I’ve decided not to add these to the queue and trust this brief treatment […]

Music, Natural Dog Training, Panksepp and the Constructal Law   http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40285693?uid=3739664&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102652666731 My argument is that the locomotive dynamic is the basis for our aesthetic appreciation of music, however not in the manner which is theorized in the article below, i.e. that synchronizing footfalls renders a beat of silence which then makes it easier to hear […]

One of the best parts of the NDT conference was the variety and quality of the various venues we visited. The Von Liche Kennel tour took us through the greatest privately owned working dog kennel in the world, an inspiring example of a dream coming true through the power of passion. We also rode on […]

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.” […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

At the 3:00 minute mark of this video there is an excellent example of how the notion of calming signals leads to a fundamental misinterpretation of two dogs interacting. The author of the video interprets an interaction between a yellow dog and a black lab in terms of calming signals, as one self-contained entity of […]

Correlations between the research of Jaak Panksepp and Natural Dog Training The debates I’ve had on various forums with modern learning theorists ultimately revolve around my claim that emotion shapes learning through a process that is far more fundamental than any system of reinforcements. I argue that reinforcements aren’t instrumental, a template comes first and […]

A dog gains awareness of its “self” from an awareness of its body. It gains an awareness of its body by being acted on by external forces, such as gravity. This awareness is framed by a bilaterally symmetrical anatomy configured around a physical center-of-gravity. A dog’s sense of its self begins with a subliminal beam of […]

Learning To Bark Is A Wave Alwynne writes an excellent blog about her dog “Cholula” which among other themes documents the trials and tribulations of teaching a dog to speak on command. http://sweetslugabed.com/blog/2012/10/09/cholula-shows-her-speak/ What’s interesting about the bark-on-command is that some dogs get it instantly whereas for some dogs it can take a long, long…………long, […]

NPR reported on some intriguing research. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/10/09/162401053/a-lively-mind-your-brain-on-jane-austen Professor Natalie Phillips who specializes in literature and neuroscience and who is especially interested in the nature of distractibility given that it is a prominent theme in Jane Austen’s work, engaged in a study examining the difference in a reader’s mind when deeply immersed versus skimming. “Phillips said […]

Olympic athletes do it, lovers do it, and now we know even Hermit Crabs do it. What is it they all do? Emotional projection, i.e. extending a sense-of-self beyond the limits of their body. “Abstract A flexible body image is required by animals if they are to adapt to body changes and move effectively within […]

Calming signals or emotion as a group mind? Calming?      Yes Signal?         No The most significant thing in this video is that the brown dog at all times acts as a mirror, as the equal and opposite to the Malamute and, it also has a drive to approach the Malamute, […]

Impulse Control There’s a lot being said these days about impulse control given the increasing number of dogs being defined as  “reactive.” A dog that over reacts to innocuous events, does so because it feels compressed and it feels this way because it perceives itself to be the object-of-attention. After repeated sensitizations, the threshold of […]

From the NY Science Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/science/some-ballet-spectators-truly-know-how-to-feel-the-moves.html?_r=1&ref=science# “Ballet lovers may “truly feel that they are dancing” when they watch a performance, researchers have found after measuring the brain activity of experienced spectators.” “In findings published in the current issue of the journal PLoS One, the scientists report that the spectators showed muscle-specific responses in their brain […]

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-infants-ascribe-social-dominance-larger.html I believe that the interpretation of this experiment is a case of leaping to a foregone conclusion. I temper this however with the acknowledgment that social dominance is indeed possible between human beings because human beings are capable of comparing one moment or one point-of-view to another. Thus it takes a certain amount of […]

Adam asks: “Also, is eye contact from the object of attraction onto the dog, required for this phenomenon of emotional projection?” It’s not required as a two way deal, but the dog fixates on the eyes of what it’s attracted to because this gives it direct and instant access to its own body’s physical center […]

Some Interesting Science: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110428070237.htm   “Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany recently reported in the journal PLoS ONE that although the physical laws governing object stability are reasonably well represented by the brain, you are a better judge of how objects fall when you are upright than when you […]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/out-of-our-brains/ The story linked above and the comments that follow is another indication that science will ultimately abandon the brain as synonymous with the mind, and thoughts as the central core of consciousness. However, the problem that continues to plague the way science approaches the problem is that they are entertaining the mind as a […]