Sometimes it feels like your dog just gets you in a way nobody else does. That’s partially because of a neurological function underpinning social connection known as inter-brain activity coupling. In short, the phenomenon is like a telepathic path to friendship, where simultaneous brain activity between two individuals primes them for social engagement. Animals are social creatures and so it’s no surprise that the phenomenon of synchronized neural activity between individuals has been documented in humans, mice, bats, and monkeys, but never between two distinct species. Until now.
New research confirms what dog lovers have always known — that humans and dogs connect on the neural level. While there’s nothing necessarily profound about this finding — not on a gut level at least — the researchers were tackling this concept for a much more heady aim.
To understand how inter-brain activity coupling may manifest differently in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and whether there’s a way to stimulate this synchronization, the researchers looked at the interaction between dogs with common genetic markers for ASD — and then gave the dogs LSD, and a human to interact with. All in the name of mind-bending scientific progress.
In a new paper published today in the journal Advanced Science, researchers from China and the U.K. become the first to demonstrate inter-brain activity coupling between two species. The study goes on to illustrate not only how a mutation associated with ASD is linked to much lower coupling, but how a dose of LSD could help two brains intertwine.
Using 10 beagles, the team performed 5 days of social experiments on pairs of unfamiliar dogs and humans. Participants wore electroencephalogram (EEG) caps to measure brain activity during 3 social interactions: when the human and dog were in different rooms, in the same room but not interacting, and in the same room while interacting, each for 5 minutes at a time. Inter-brain synchronization, the authors found, increased in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, both of which deal with attention, during the most intense social interactions like petting and looking at each other. This correlation continued to strengthen over the 5 days.
Next, the authors repeated the experiment using 13 dogs bred with Shank3 mutations, which are the most common genetic risk factors for ASD. The Shank3 mutants showed a loss of inter-brain activity coupling during interactions with humans, indicating this connection’s absence. However, 24 hours after administering a dose of LSD (7.5 μg per kg^-1 bodyweight), the authors observed much higher inter-brain correlation in the dogs’ frontal and parietal brain regions, outperforming dogs who had received a saline solution.
That’s a lot to unpack. Demonstrating a few firsts, this study crucially reveals how LSD can potentially promote inter-brain activity coupling in individuals with ASD. The next challenge is to elucidate the biomechanisms behind why this happens. Until then, we can rest assured that when your pup gives you a deep loving look, it’s as real as it gets.
