Human selection of dogs could have led to the brain function.
For nothing, humans’ best friend is a dog as your dog really does know what you’re saying, a brain scan shows how (See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2016/08/30/confirmed-your-do).
Little wonder, when you return from a tiring day, it soothes you and when you are in a good mood, it plays with you as your dog really gets you, as scientists in Hungary say, who have published a groundbreaking study that found dogs understand both the meaning of words and the intonation used to speak them.
They carried out a study to investigate how dog brains process speech and it revealed that dogs care about both what humans say and how we say it. It’s -author Tamás Faragó acknowledged that dog’s left hemisphere’s response to praise words and dogs hear the neutral words in daily human conversation as often as they hear the praise words, “so the main difference will be not familiarity, but whether the word is addressed to the dog or not.” In other words, whether it has meaning for the pooch. And, it makes dogs lured to rewards center as they are stimulated by pleasant things such as petting and food and sex.
The researchers found it unlikely that human selection of dogs during their domestication, which occurred at least 15,000 years ago, could have led to this sort of brain function, but it is something quite natural to them.
It also puts a notch down and we aren’t as special as we like to think, at least when it comes to how our brains deal with language. What makes words uniquely human, Andics said, is that we came up with using them.
So, Hachiko: A Dog’s Story; a 2009 Hollywood movie, in which the protagonist, Richard Gere’s pet Hachiko; his dog, daily waits for him at the railway station where he returns from work and one day, when Gere had died and never returned, still Hachiko would come to the railway station daily, until he died, is not a mere fiction as there existed a real Hachiko in Odate, Japan in 1923, when his master, Dr. Elisaburo Ueno, a professor of Tokyo University and died in May 1925 and Hachio, the real Hachiko, returned to Shibuya railway station for next nine years at the stipulated time!