Best of Design Matters: Alexandra Horowitz

0:00This archival episode of Design Matters originally dropped in January of 2023. One of the things that is key, is central to the feeling of understanding and intimacy and connection with somebody is that you can look at each other in the face, look in each other's eyes. Dogs will do this with us. Dogs look us in the faces.

0:26From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

0:34For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Alexandra Horowitz tells us about her study of dogs and why we humans have trouble understanding them. It's very hard for humans to imagine that animals are thinking if they're not thinking in words or pictures.

1:01We feed them. We go on long walks with them. We groom them and rub their bellies. We even share our beds with them. But do we really know who they are? Yes, they're dogs. But do we know what's going on between those two floppy ears? Alexandra Horowitz knows a lot more than most people. She is a professor at Barnard College, where she teaches creative nonfiction writing and audio storytelling. As senior research fellow, she also runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. She's also written some of the world's best books about dog cognition. Her latest is The Year of the Puppy, How Dogs Become Themselves.

1:48She's here to talk about the relationship between humans and our canine friends, and a bit about herself as well. Alexandra Horowitz, welcome to Design Matters. It's a complete pleasure to be here. Thanks, Debbie. Alexandra, you were born in Philadelphia. Your family moved to Golden, Colorado when you were a child. And I read that your dad was the son you circled, and you were influenced both by his work ethic as a litigator and his humor. How were you influenced by his humor? I think he saw levity in everything. He took himself seriously, and at the same time, he didn't take himself too seriously.

2:28I mean, he was born of this kind of East Coast generation of lawyers and doctors who really felt like they were making a change in this world. And at the same time, he was very ready to find the silliness in a situation and the playfulness in the situation. And that's definitely imbued my work and made it possible for me to do what I do. As you were growing up, I understand you not only like to watch your dog and your cat, you like to observe the ants in your yard and counted the prairie dogs in the field on your way to school. What motivated this early interest in animals and insects? That's some deep dive research you've been into my background there, Debbie.

3:14Yeah. You know, I don't know exactly what motivated it. When you're growing up in Colorado, I felt very exposed to part of the natural world. We lived in a community which was, I guess, suburban by some definition, but also the community itself was enforced as a kind of natural community. People didn't have lawns particularly. In fact, I think they were forbidden. And the mountains were kind of our backdrop. And there were elk wandering through the foothills. And you just felt like that was part of your life. And so you observed it naturally. It was just the scene that was going by outside your window.

3:56And it was only later when I wound up moving to cities that it felt like that was quite unusual. But I retained that interest in, you know, looking closely, especially at animal communities. I know at that time veterinary work didn't interest you. At that point in your life, what were you thinking you might do professionally? I wasn't really on a pre-professional track. I think my father was an attorney and my mother had been trained as a lawyer as well. And I thought, well, you know, that's something that I could do with a kind of analytic acumen, which I prided myself as a young Alexandra as having.

4:36It didn't pan out. I didn't, I think, have any special interest in law, although I applied to law schools. I wound up doing philosophy in college. And I also thought that that was a potential avenue. But I wasn't an academic philosopher at heart, right? I wasn't that driven by these arguments and conversations. You know, my dad, one of the things my dad gave to me as a child was the freedom to not know what I was going to be. He really had confidence in both me and my brother that we would just wind up doing something that was appropriate for us. And he would support whatever kind of thing that was.

5:19You know, he was, as I say, he was a lawyer. He grew up around people with certain kind of very traditional professional roles. So for him, it was maybe a leap to say, but he did, you know, you should be an artist. You should, you know, he should go out and be an artist. And I thought, well, you know, I don't have any particular artistic talent. But I appreciated that for him, what that meant was, you don't have to do follow a traditional path and will be there, you know, rooting for you, whatever you do. So I didn't know. I just sort of went headstrong toward the things that interested me. You did study philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

6:01Why philosophy? I had the fortune to have a philosophy class in high school. A teacher named Sean Smith taught philosophy. He was, in fact, now that I reflect back on it, a master's student in philosophy himself. He was finishing a degree in Edinburgh and teaching at this Colorado school. And I loved it. I just loved the thought processes involved in setting out an argument and following its path and the way the words kind of tumbled out of philosophers' mouths and the things they got to think about. So I pursued that as a degree. My mother had been a philosophy major as well, so it probably was, you know, a little bit my birthright to be thinking deep philosophical thoughts as a young thing.

6:50And I actually really fell in love with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of J.L. Austin, which actually led later to kind of another career of mine. But again, it wasn't with any thinking, hmm, this is going to pan out into a profession, a specific profession, more just this is a way of thinking that I want to encourage in myself, right? The ability to make an argument and follow it through to a conclusion. After you graduated, you worked at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. What was your job there? I was a lexicographer, which is briefly a definer of words, which seems insane in retrospect.

7:36You know, I was just out of college. I was a kind of dabbler in dictionaries. I was the type of person who liked to sit down, open up a dictionary and read several pages for fun. And somehow this led me to the notion that maybe a dictionary company would want to hire me as a philosophy major from Penn with no experience, particularly in linguistics or lexicography. And they did. So I wound up being one of the maybe 20 definers on the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which came out in 91. And it was kind of a fabulous gig. You just are defining new words, making sure the old meanings are still consistent with how we're using words.

8:24For somebody who's at all interested in language, you know, I was the type of person who would collect big words or like fun, fancy words and write them down and have like little boxes of three by five cards of these things. This was like a dream come true. You're just surrounded by big, fancy words and also really quotidian, ordinary words that are really tricky to define and therefore become intricate and fun. So, yeah, I did that for the length of that edition of the dictionary. I thought it was a wonderful overlap to share with you that at that particular moment in time, I worked at the graphic design firm that designed that particular edition of the dictionary.

9:11Yeah. Frankfurt gives all kind. So I spent a lot of time looking at page proofs of that dictionary. Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. Well, it was well designed. And I should say, yes, Johan Vipper designed most of that. And I know he did the cover and he and I went on to work for many, many years at Hot 97, the hip hop radio station. But I understand that's also where you met your husband, who I think the first question he asked you was what the etymology was of the word pumpernickel after hearing you mention your dog's name, which was pumpernickel. That's right. Is this true? Yeah, this is a kind of sordid but real tale.

9:52Well, I didn't meet him at Miriam, although he now works at Miriam Webster. So it's all come back round to Miriam. I was in New York, and he was working as a mover, as a furniture mover. And I was helping my parents move furniture from one apartment to another and supervising this move. I barely had any furniture of my own at the time. I just finished graduate school. and he came in the door and my dog Pumpernickel was barking. And I said, Pumpernickel, you don't need to bark. And his response, the mover's response at the door was, do you know the etymology of Pumpernickel? And I said, well, I mean, I do.

10:30She's my dog. We had a little disagreement about the etymology because Pumpernickel was this German bread, which is notoriously difficult to digest. And so Pumpernickel comes from the words for flatulent goblin. But he thought that the more apt etymology was farting devil. So we had a little disagreement about the etymology of Pumpernickel. And the rest is history, as they say. Yes. You should have known instantly you were soulmates. I love that. It was extremely unlikely. You then moved to New York and worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker. Now, The New Yorker is one of the most notoriously difficult places to find a job, and fact checking is one of the most difficult jobs there is.

11:20They are held to a very high standard. What was that experience like? Also a great experience. One of the things we did at Merriam-Webster in the moments when we were not defining words was we were collecting words, basically, meaning we would read prolifically and mark words that seemed to be used in such a way that it made their meaning quite visible, quite transparent, or mark new words or what seemed to be new uses of words. And one of the things that would go around that multiple people would read and mark, as we said, was The New Yorker. And so I became a New Yorker reader. You know, I'd been a person who grew up just looking at the drawings as a kid and one could forever just look at the drawings in The New Yorker, of course.

12:06And yet I started reading and loved the magazine, as everybody around me did, and just cold called them, right? Just wrote to them and said, any job at the magazine I will take. And it just so happened. I mean, I really don't understand how some of these things happen sometimes, but I feel like one leans into one's interest and it works, right? I mean, I guess I'm forgetting the times when I've leaned into an interest and it didn't work, or I tried to do something and people, you know, or the very many employment letters I wrote, which didn't respond, where Merriam-Webster did. So it seems inevitable in retrospect.

12:44But here too, I just wrote to them and they were interviewing for fact checker positions. It was right when Tina Brown had taken over editorial helm of the magazine and her interest in the magazine was in more topical articles. And of course, The New Yorker had been famously non-topical, right? Like you could do a three-part, 50 ,000-word series on bogs, but there wasn't really anything on what had happened last week. But when you do a topical magazine, you really need to be able to change directions quickly. New news comes out, you have a writer write something, and the checker has to check it quickly, or a whole team of checkers.

13:19So they were doubling their checking department, which had been pretty small, I think about eight people. And so I actually was hired freelance at first, and then eventually got a staff position. And it was also terrific because a great camaraderie. My peers were so sharp and funny, and it was a great, exciting place to be. And it also was a really interesting place for me because, you know, as somebody who had this little bit of philosophy background, I was very interested in the nature of a fact, right? The nature of truth and what counted as confirming the fact, verifying truth, right? Right.

13:57And that's always been a motif for me, actually. You know, the fact that I was able to define words in the dictionary. Sure, there were other editors who looked at those words, but it was interesting to me to be put in the position from being just a user of words to a definer of words. And here, maybe I wasn't writing these facts, but I was confirming like the truthiness of the fact, right? And so those turns were very interesting for me. And that was one of the, I think the things I take away from being a fact checker there was somewhat of the slippery nature of facts and what it means to confirm a fact and what knowledge is.

14:36Yeah, I mean, you're sort of the last word on words, which is so philosophically interesting to me. Yeah, right, right. So besides being just a very cool job, it had this sort of conceptual interest. While you were there, you worked on fact-checking several pieces by the legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote books including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the book Awakenings, which became a very popular movie. What was it like working with Oliver. I was never the main checker on his pieces. I was a sort of ancillary checker. And of course, his pieces were full, full, full of facts of all sorts, facts about individual people, about neurological conditions, about philosophical histories.

15:30And he was a really generous writer. You know, he was interested in working collaboratively with his checkers to find the truth there, right, versus being antagonistic with the checker, as sometimes writers could be, right? They didn't want to have somebody else looking over their shoulder and saying, well, you know, there's another way of looking at this, or this other person says this thing. But he was fabulous, and he was quite an inspiration as a writer for me as well, as somebody who had taken his scientific career and made a writerly career out of it. So that wound up being important in my life.

16:06Did working with him at all influence your decision to go back to school to get a PhD in cognitive science? Completely. It completely influenced, right? The cognitive science was a kind of budding field at the time, which combined, you know, the types of things one would ask questions about in philosophy. Where is mind? Like, what is an individual? Do we have free will? with neuroscience and psychology and anthropology and computer science, all these other people who were asking similar questions in their own methodological ways. And so it was this multifaceted field. It wasn't something that Oliver had done, but his approach was his own kind of version of cognitive science, right?

16:51He was taking the William James and connecting it to the Raymond Cahal neurological experiments. and then writing about it in his own sort of novelistic way, using like very strong narrative voice. So I felt like it was of a kind with Oliver Sacks' work. And yeah, that's why I went back to graduate school. That's the first time I started thinking kind of professionally, frankly, that, oh, I would like to be a scientist who dabbles in these topics in some way. You got your PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and you described the PhD in cognitive science in the following way. It's basically an interdisciplinary degree.

17:35Philosophers ask, what is the mind? Neuroscientists are interested in examining the brain. Psychologists want to look at behavior. So those fields, plus computer science with an interest in artificial intelligence and anthropology, converge in this one interdisciplinary field, which wants to use different methods and approaches to tackle the questions of mind. And Alexandra, to me, this sounds like the most interesting PhD on the planet, really, truly. It really, really is fabulous. I think that so much creativity comes from interdisciplinarity, right? You have to be skilled and trained at the thing you're doing, but also you need the perspective from outside of your field, it seems to me, to really make movement in your own field.

18:24So cognitive science had that kind of baked in. Initially, you trained as an ethologist, which is the science of animal behavior, and you joined two research groups observing highly social creatures, the white rhinoceros at the wild animal park in Escondido and the bonobos, which are pygmy chimpanzees at the San Diego Zoo, where you learn the science of careful observations, data gathering, and statistical analysis. What are some of the things you learned about these species? Both of these projects were ongoing projects of faculty members and in the latter case and in the former case, researchers at the zoo who wanted to basically do basic research on animal species.

19:10So even though we're familiar with rhinoceros and bonobos and all the other animals who are common to see at a zoo, for instance, we don't know everything about their lives, right? We might not know all about their social habits. We might not know how they forage or how they identify themselves, how they identify each other. And so each project had its own interest. The rhinoceros project was interested in, well, the white rhinoceros is a fantastic species. You know, we, I didn't know much about them at all, just except for that they were an African species. There were fewer, many fewer of them than there used to be.

19:52They're not endangered, I think, anymore. They are matrilineal, so they live in groups of women. And the males, who are usually smaller than the females, only approach when they've received kind of advanced word that a female is ready to mate. otherwise he'll just get beat up yeah they're just they're really not interested in his company at all they don't hang out with the males at all they but they'll endure his company if they're interested in mating and the way they leave this communication that they're interested in mating is through their dung actually and they leave these kind of huge heaps of dung that's they're like um you know bulletin boards with all the information about all the rhinoceros uh it has all the health and mating, reproductive status, etc.

20:42They're basically leaving a message. Once they leave, the male can go and sniff and see if he can pursue one of the females. So we're basically looking at how does their behavior relate to their endocrinology and that people would go in and gather samples and check their hormone levels and then we would try to sync it with their behavior. So it was the first time that I'd really looked at behavior of an animal over a long period closely, where you start to think about them as individuals who have their own life histories. And you also think about the fact that their individual life history, while having interesting analogs to a human life history, you know, is full of its own complexities, some of which I might not be aware of.

21:28For instance, I didn't use my sense of smell to do much in my life, particularly, certainly not to find out information about other people, except for maybe accidentally, and even then, really inadvertently. So it made me kind of aware of the types of things that would later drive my research, like the looking closely, looking over a long period of time, the importance of sort of individual animals, and the perceptual world of non-human animals, which is in so many ways, much more expansive than ours. You also spent many hours at the local dog parks and beaches with your famous dog, Pumpernickel, where you began to see the interplay between him and other dogs in entirely new ways.

22:17And you wrote this about the experience, and I found it so moving and so vivid that I'd really like to share it verbatim with our listeners. It's about a paragraph, if you don't mind. Sure, sure.

22:57I saw dogs too clever for their playmates. I saw people misreading canine requests as confusion and delight as aggression. I began bringing a video camera with us and taping our outings at the parks. At home, I watched the tapes of dogs playing with dogs, of people ball and frisbee tossing to their dogs, tapes of chasing, fighting, petting, running, barking. With new sensitivity to the possible richness of social interactions in an entirely non-linguistic world, all of these once ordinary activities now seem to me to be an untapped font of information. When I began watching the videos in extremely slow motion playback, I saw behaviors I'd never seen in years of living with dogs.

23:44Examined closely, simple play frolicking between two dogs became a dizzying series of synchronous behaviors, active role swapping, variations on communicative displays, flexible adaptation to others' attention, and rapid movement between highly diverse play acts. What I was seeing were snapshots of the minds of the dogs, visible in the ways they communicated with each other and tried to communicate with the people around them. and two, in the way they interpreted other dogs and people's actions. I never saw pumpernickel or any dog the same way again. It's like one of those Proustian moments for me.

24:28I just love that whole vivid experience. I saw it so deeply and with such detail, and it felt like in that experience, your whole life changed. It really did. It's the thing that's right in front of you that you've never seen. And in fact, that way of looking has infected me in other directions as well. But just with dogs, just with this one subject, it's profound to see that something you thought you knew had all this dimensionality, which was invisible and which in fact makes it run, makes it work and is essential to its existence. So, you know, thank you for highlighting that. It was profound for me and it changed the course of it.

25:13It created my professional career as well. How did the experiences with Pumpernickel translate into even considering this line of research? Before your work, there really wasn't a cognitive science of dogs. Yeah, I was sensitive to and interested in dogs. You know, I was a dog lover. I was like all the people who were dog lovers, identical, right? I just was interested in and fascinated by dogs, had the same types of generalized questions that a lot of people direct toward me now. You know, what is my dog thinking? What does my dog know about me? I had those questions, but I just didn't think of them as scientific questions that were answerable, potentially.

25:54Oh, Alexandra, I had those questions too, but hired a dog whisperer just to give you a difference in sort of life path. That's right. That's a different avenue. So I think that that was meaningful to me, not just with her, right, but in sort of in every direction. Why do we love dogs so much? Their responsiveness to us, I think, is central to it. They are not unique as domesticated animals, not unique as animals who are tameable or friendly or have the cognitive capacities they do, but they are really unusual in their responsiveness to us, their interest in us, their agreeableness with us, and their seeming ability to read us.

26:47so well. And frankly, we like that a lot. That's a kind of responsiveness that, you know, I think I look for in other human beings, this kind of sensitivity that dogs seem to come with automatically, right? I think that's the center of it. I think having now had dogs for most of my adult life, I've seen how for me and for others, They sort of are able to crack hardened hearts open in a way that sometimes people, other people can't. And I don't know if it's because of the trust or the unconditional sense of love that they provide us. But I'm sure you've witnessed that over and over again. Yeah.

27:31And when you say unconditional, I think that's such an interesting observation, right? that you yell at a dog, get angry at a dog, accidentally step on a dog, and you turn around, and they're completely ready to start over again. And that's maybe sometimes not to their benefit, but they are delighted every time you return home. And who is like that? Who in our lives is like that? And I think another element of this, you know, being able to crack someone's veneer, for instance, is, I've been thinking about a lot because I worked in words for such a long time, is there wordlessness? You know, a lot of people like to voice what their dogs are saying, and that's a sort of way of animating the quiet member of this conversation that you always feel like you're having with your dog.

28:25But really, I think it would be alarming if they said anything out loud. There's something about just listening, which they seem to do. That's so interesting. I had never really thought of it that way. When I first met the woman who's now my wife, she knew that I was both a dog and a cat person. At one point, I had two dogs and two cats. Now, I have two cats. At the time, I had just had two cats and told her that I'd always had dogs. And she said that she was definitely not a dog person and relate a story how she was bitten when she was five years old and ever since then had been deathly afraid of dogs.

29:00And over our years together, she saw how I responded when seeing dogs on the street or with other friends' dogs and ultimately thought about getting a dog, which we subsequently have done. And this person who considered herself not a dog person, in quotes, is now buying clothes for Max, takes him everywhere, talks to him, drives with him. I would say that they are by far best friends. And as someone who is as verbose as she is as a writer, I find it really interesting that that wordlessness might also be rather comforting to her. I hadn't thought about that. I think that's so interesting. Just letting your own words hang into space without a judgment.

29:46Yeah, yeah. While still having that feeling of a relationship, of somebody who understands you at some level, right? Absolutely. Oh, yeah. They're soulmates. I mean, I had a dog that was a soulmate for 17 years. I mean, I adore Max. I adore Max. But they are soul connected in a way that I was with Duff and, you know, just thrilled that she could have that experience. Well, I'm glad because those early dog bite folks, it can be so traumatic. And most people don't recover from that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why we got Max as a puppy, and I'm going to talk to you about that in a bit. But in the meantime, I want to go back to your history a little bit.

30:27Well, really, your moment now even. You are a leader of a sea change taking place in science's attitude towards studying dogs. And the transformation isn't complete, but the landscape of dog research is remarkably different than it was when you first started 20 years ago. And you've said that the scientists doing this work have seen what you've seen, that the dog is a perfect entry into the study of non-human animals. Why is the dog the perfect entry into this study? For the reason that I got interested in studying dogs, which is that they are ubiquitous, available, and actually cognitively far more skilled than we'd given them credit for.

31:13So there was another researcher, Brian Hare, who was a grad student when I was a grad student, and who is now a leader in canine cognition, who was doing research with chimpanzees, where they were asking if chimps could follow a human pointing one direction or another, that human cue of a point, which all babies learn to follow very early in their life. We don't come following a point, but we learn it pretty quickly. And it's really essential. It seems like a simple gesture, but what it is, is an understanding that someone else's gesture is referential, is leading to something else apart from themselves, that someone is showing you something.

31:55So understanding that is key. And chimpanzees are not great at following pointing. And that was surprising to researchers because they're our closest non-human relatives. And it was a type of thing that made people say, oh, there's this huge cognitive gap between humans and non-humans. And I was always dubious of this. And Brian was as well. And he, you know, tried the pointing trick with his dog in the garage. And his dog was perfectly able to follow his point. And many dogs, most dogs are quite good at following a point, just like humans and just like almost no other animals, frankly. So dogs turn out to have some of these cognitive skills that we value because there are cognitive skills.

32:37They're the things that make us human. And as a species, we're terribly interested and have been since the ancient philosophers in what makes humans human, right? What distinguishes us from non-humans. So dogs wind up being interesting cognitively, and then they're also widely available. You know, these other animals whose, the research projects I joined to sort of learn And how to be an animal observer as a graduate student. They were with animals who were in zoos or wild animal parks. Other people study. Jane Goodall-like, right? Find the animals in the wild. And both of those are very effortful.

33:15In the case of studying animals in the wild. Takes many years just to identify animals and get them to acclimate to you. And also, in some cases, artificial. You know, studying an animal in a tiny little enclosure, even the best zoo, is extremely unnatural environments. So you're probably not getting a lot of natural animal behavior. Here with dogs, we have an animal who is right in front of you, like widely available. People will come with their dogs to my lab, you know, and participate in studies and then go home with their dogs. I don't have to keep dogs in a lab, feed them, have them in an artificial environment or find them out in the world, right?

33:55They come to us. So they wind up being terrific subjects. And also, you know, at the end, you can play with them and give them a pat on the head and interact with them in a way you can't with other non-human animals. Neanderthals didn't live with dogs, but Homo sapiens have been in close proximity with dogs for thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years. How did this relationship with canines first come to be? That is still being worked out. There is a lot of argument about how domestication started. We know that it happened multiple times in different parts of the world. One of the theories that I've always liked, but we don't have complete confirmation for, is really that some wolves started to self-domesticate in a way.

34:46In other words, they became less fearful of humans, more willing to approach, for instance, a village where people would throw out their trash, and then that would be the bones that they couldn't eat from their kill, for instance, and then that would be another source, potentially, of food for the wolves. And that eventually those people might have started taking in some of the young pups of those somewhat tamer, self-tamed wolves. And that over time found use for those wolves as guards, for instance, as giving them information about when a predator was about or even as food in a lean time. and then started selecting, therefore breeding, and thereby domesticating those wolves into what we see as dogs today.

35:35That's one possible story, but honestly, we can't know. And there is still a lot of interesting scientific discussion about what it might be. There are now between 700 million and 1 billion dogs in the world. Of those dogs, about 470 million are kept as pets. And you stated that through the artificial selection of domestication, dogs have evolved to be sensitive to the things that make up our cognition, including attention to others. How does that influence how we feel about each other? For instance, dogs look us in the faces, right? One of the things that is key, is central to the feeling of understanding and intimacy and connection with somebody is that you can look at each other in the face, look in each other's eyes.

36:29Intimacy is in a held eye gaze. Dogs will do this with us. Now, this doesn't seem like a big behavior, like a profound behavior, but it's quite unusual. eye gaze is usually a threat between animals so a wolf i recommend not holding a long eye gaze with any wolves if a wolf stares at another wolf it's considered a threat it's a kind of demand to back down and one of them will otherwise they're in a fight dogs somehow have suppressed that urge to feel like eye gaze is potentially threatening in that way, and instead have started to use eye gaze the way we use it, as part of forming a connection, a part of forming an understanding, and also then as information gathering.

37:21Just as they follow a point, they can follow your gaze to what you're looking at and find hidden food, find where you're going, look at your gaze to see which direction you're going next. Those little simple behaviors like that one have led the dog to feel like a co-conspirator with us and able to interact with us and use us to get information. It's so interesting. I was thinking about how when used aggressively, a stare can, between humans, also provoke a fight with somebody saying something like, what are you looking at? Kind of a thing. Right. Right. Right. Had you like that little New Yorker in me come out.

38:04But it can also be used as a flirting device. So it's interesting that we also can use more primitive notations with our eyes. Yeah. And I think that a stare could be too long with the dog as well. Oh, yeah. Sometimes I just stare deeply into Max's eyes and he just stops. He just looks away, goes off and plays with the toy. Your work has been influenced by Jakob von Uxkull, and Uxkull believed that anyone interested in understanding the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt, their subjective self -world. Can you talk a little bit more about the umwelten and how that has impacted how you think about animals?

38:49Sure. Von Okskul's idea, which he proposed early in the 20th century, using this word Umwelt, which is my understanding in German just means world or environment, was quite novel. His idea was that one needed to consider the sort of subjective world, the self-world of each individual and also of each species to really appreciate their experience. I must have come to Warnock School via some philosophers when I was in graduate school and not thought about it much until I was writing my first book, Inside of a Dog, and dived into that material again and realized that what he was doing was this beautiful combination of subjective and scientific approach to other animals.

39:35It was trying to understand the animal through not just knowing what their sensory abilities were and their cognitive abilities were, the types of things that cognitive scientists would do, but also through trying to appreciate their perspective, the things that were meaningful to them, what they were trying to perceive with those sensory abilities and what they were trying to understand or who they were trying to interact with, with those cognitive abilities. And so that approach of imagining the umwelt of another animal became really central to my thinking about dogs from that point forward.

40:12And in fact, still drives, I'd say, all of my research questions. My real ultimate aim is to understand what it's like to be a dog. And that means to me to be able to imagine what it's like in their world from their perspective and point of view. You've stated that research hasn't confirmed that dogs are self-aware, but it also hasn't confirmed that they aren't either. And you've said that in one study you did watching slow motion video of dogs and social play led you to the conclusion that dogs act as though they are thinking about the minds of other dogs. And I just found that mind-blowing, no pun intended.

40:55Can you talk a little bit more about those findings? Yeah, this was my very first research study with dogs, and I was interested in what kind of behaviors we could see in play. You know, play is very essential for human development, for human social development, and especially in thinking about others. social play often involves pretend I'm pretending to be my dad and I have to imagine in that role what does he want to do what kind of thing would he do right and it's through exercises and games like that that we start to appreciate not everybody knows what we know that other people have their own beliefs and knowledge different from our own and we go from being like the Piagetian ego to being someone who appreciates that others have minds and you have to think about others' perspectives.

41:47And that leads to, you know, our social community today. Whether non-humans could do that wasn't obvious, but I thought maybe in play you would see it because social play is this fast-paced kind of rambunctious interaction where they're using a lot of behaviors that in other contexts might be aggressive behaviors or mating behaviors or are somewhat violent, biting and tackling. And so the whole thing can only work if each of them is gauging whether the other participant sort of understands the game and is still in the game. And so I was looking at these behaviors that the dogs did called play signals, which basically frames the whole play.

42:29It's like something like a play bow, which most people live with dogs are familiar with, right, where the dog puts their front legs down and the rump up high and wags their tail. And it's an invitation to play, essentially. But it's also saying something like, everything that happens after this is play. So if I do that, and you play bow back, and then I bite you, you don't think, hey, you don't get defensive and bite me back, except for as a play bite, you realize it's all in play, we're now participating in a game. So So it's like this meta communication that changes the nature of all of the things I say after that.

43:06And I realized that dogs were using these play signals really intentionally. They were using them with attention to whether the other dog was able to receive the signal, for instance. Like, it's no good doing the signal if you've got your back turned. It's no good doing the signal if you're facing the other way, you're engaged with somebody else, you're interacting with a person. And I have to get your attention, make sure it's at me, and then do the signal. And that's what dogs did. And what I loved about that was that that is the type of thinking about other minds that we do naturally all the time, right?

43:42If I want to talk to you, Debbie, like I wait till you're not talking to somebody else. And then I start talking and then I pause to see if you've understood that I'm talking to you. If I can't get your attention by waiting, I tap you on the shoulder or I call out or something like that. And this type of use of attention in communication is very natural to us, but it's also indicative that we're appreciating that other people have their own minds and they're engaged in their own things. And that if we want to communicate, we have to engage them in their attention first. So dogs were doing precisely the same thing.

44:19You've written about how language marks the difference between human memory and dog memory. And I recently interviewed Temple Grandin, who has done a lot of work in animal cognition, and she's posited that animals might think in pictures. And I was wondering what your thoughts might be on the ways in which dogs can think. I think that's perfectly possible, right? I think it's interesting because it's very hard for humans to imagine that animals are thinking if they're not thinking in words or pictures, right? But I certainly want to imagine as well that they're thinking in smells. What would that mean for us?

44:56It's very hard for us to think about that, right? Because again, we bring, we kind of verbalize or we image it. But the fact that they know that something's happened, they're anticipating what's gonna happen next, that something is happening for them at that moment, to me, that's not a question. Thinking is happening. So then the question is, well, what was the nature of that? It's probably the nature of their perception generally. And most non-humans are actually pretty olfactory, not just dogs, but lots of non-humans. So maybe it's also thinking in smells and sounds. Well, a nose of a beagle, for example, has 300 million receptor sites compared with a human being's nose, which has only 6 million.

45:41So dogs smell fundamentally differently than humans. And from what I understand, I've learned through reading your books that a dog's sniff is actually different than ours, as well as their exhale, so much so that their exhale actually enhances their sense of smell. How does that actually work? You know, who knew that one could have a better or worse sniff, right? But it turns out our sniffs are pretty bad. Their whole anatomy is set up to enable olfactory information to get to the brain. And that includes all those receptor sites where odors connect to the cell and it causes the cell to fire and it sends a signal to the brain.

46:25But it's also just anatomy. It's the muscles of the nostrils that allow them to sniff up to seven times a second, something that for us would be basically hyperventilation. but an analogy would be in you know the 60 frames per second that our eyes are able to see right and our brains make into fluid motion since this is their picture of the world right they don't want to be constantly releasing the picture every time they exhale the way we get rid of a smell is we exhale through our nostrils right if you are in the new york city in the summer and it smells like garbage you might just exhale through your nose and that literally displaces the odor molecules from the back of your nose so that you at that moment aren't smelling the smell of garbage.

47:11But dogs don't want to. That's their scene of the world, right? So they instead have these side slits and that's how they exhale. And then that does kind of create a little vortex. People who study airflow have shown that helps hurry in the next snoutful of air. So everything about them is designed to allow them to see the world through smell. They can also tell time through smell, I've learned through your work. I'm wondering if you can share how they do that. Well, this is my positing based on something on the nature of smell. So an interesting thing about vision is that light travels so quickly that when we open our eyes, the world just appears.

47:54and that seems straightforward to us but if you look at any other medium you see that that's not at all straightforward that's not how other media work at all right if you're in sound sound travels through air and similarly odors need to travel on the breeze odors that you smell in your nose are something called volatile organic compounds that just means molecules that are light enough to go up your nose. So they have to be in the air to be smelled. Well, they get in the air on the breeze and there isn't a constant breeze. It's not like opening your eyes and seeing the room. Airflow determines how you're going to smell something.

48:34And similarly, odors will decay over time. That determines what you smell. So there's been this little bit of research on tracking dogs, these researchers asked if they could tell which way a missing person had gone. And the dog was able to tell just through sniffing five footsteps which way the person had gone. And that is because they could differentiate the odor concentration from the first to the fifth footstep. There was less odor in the first footstep and more in the fifth. Another way of thinking about that is the first footstep was older. It actually told the story of something in the past, the more distant past than the fifth footstep.

49:21The fifth footstep is newer. So I very much see odors as inherently carrying time information in them. When a dog leaves their house and they stick their nose on the ground and smell whatever is on the sidewalk or the patch of grass, they're basically collecting information about whoever has passed by. Nobody is there at that moment, but whatever dog or person or food or bird has been by, there's some olfactory evidence of their presence. Similarly, if they stick their nose up into the breeze, they might catch the odor of someone who's about to come around the corner, whose olfactory information is being carried ahead of them.

50:06So dogs in that one moment to us, for us, which is just one visual moment, are experiencing a little bit of the past and a little bit of the future. That's incredible. Alexandra, what is a dog's sense of time and absence? I'm always worried then when I leave a dog alone in the past, when I left Scruffy and Duff by themselves, or now when I leave Max by himself, he might think that we're never coming back. Do they remember that I've left or we've left before and always come back? Is there any sort of repetitive cognition that they can sort of hang their hats on, so to speak? Yeah, I think one of the most agreeable things about dogs living with us is that they're really creatures of habit.

50:54So if we establish patterns, habitual patterns with them, they learn those really rapidly. And this is exactly how, for instance, your dog knows if you get up at the same time of day to feed them or go for a walk, right? They are sensitive to our behavior and they learn our habits. By the same regard, if you left for work every day, were gone for six hours and came back, they get sensitive to that period of time and know approximately when you're going to return. Now, some people think, well, that's not the case. You know, I just go to my basement and I come back up and my dog is so delighted to see me.

51:28But there was actually research that looked at the intensity of the greeting that dogs give to their people when somebody's been gone a half an hour or an hour or several hours. And it's more intense the longer you've been gone, right? They're sensitive to that feeling of the time that you've been missing, but they all also are very adaptable and will endure the same time again and again and again without over anxiety that this time you're gone for good. In addition to all of your teaching and research, you also write books. Your first book, Inside of a Dog, What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, came out in 2009, became a New York Times number one bestseller, spent 64 weeks on the bestseller list.

52:19I read an interview wherein someone asked you how you became a writer and you stated, I wrote a book and people started calling me a writer. But you're such a beautiful writer. You have such a way with language. How did you get to be such a good writer? Thank you. I mean, I think whatever writing skill I have is how every writer has her skill, which is through reading, through an interest in language, right? Through an enjoyment of the playfulness of language. And here, there's an evocation of my dad again, and his enjoyment in the sometimes silliness of language and how one can be playful even with a serious topic.

52:59So I was just like so many others, a profligate reader. And then whatever I create is simply a result of that plus time. Your most recent book, The Year of the Puppy, How Dogs Become Themselves, is part memoir, part book of science. The book is about your quest to understand the science of early dog development by studying the behavior of your own brand new puppy. And sort of reminded me, you mentioned Jean Piaget, and this was a psychologist before, and he used his own children as subjects in formulating his theories about developmental psychology. Was that intentional in getting your own puppy to figure it out?

53:44Yes, exactly. I couldn't bear any dogs myself, but I thought I could do one better. I could just adopt a dog and subject them to the same type of scrutiny that really I subject all my subjects to, but not my child, and live with them at the same time. Your new puppy entered your world in the spring of 2020, and your family at the time included what you've described as three reasonable humans, you, your husband, and your son, two elderly dogs, and one contented cat in a home that was replete with animal fur. The pandemic was just taking hold. What made you decide to get a puppy at that particular moment?

54:25This was an accident. I was interested in following litters of dogs who had been fostered by shelters and individuals associated with those shelters and then following all of the puppies during their early development. And I was looking for multiple litters to follow. I happened to be following one litter in upstate New York of 11 puppies when suddenly it was March 13th. Our world shut down on itself and I realized, oh, I'm probably not going to be led into people's homes to watch their litters of puppies develop. I bet not only is this the last litter I'm going to watch for a while, but this is the litter from which we should get a puppy.

55:14So I hadn't been thinking that there would be a puppy in this litter. You know, I wanted to collect a lot of information from a lot of exposures, but circumstances dictated it. Talk about how you chose your particular dog from that litter and why you named the dog Quiddity, which literally means the essence of something. Why that name? And in fact, also as a title of a philosopher's book, W.V.O. Quine, he called it Quiddities. So there's a philosophy connection, but that was unintentional. You know, once I realized we were going to adopt a puppy in this litter, I had a kind of panic, which was that as a scientist, even one who doesn't proclaim to be a scientist of early dog development per se, I thought, well, I should be able to predict.

56:06I should be able to know which the perfect puppy is for our family, right? Not the perfect puppy. They're all perfect. But which one would suit our funny little family unit best? And I really couldn't tell. You know, all of them had these becoming characteristics. They were all becoming themselves. Their personalities were starting to diverge. Their behavior was starting to be individuated. And I couldn't tell. Happily, the foster, who was taking care of all these, heroically taking care of all these puppies and the mother, had met all the people who wanted to adopt puppies and kind of pre-assigned several puppies to each one as possible choices.

56:49And in our group, she assigned one female to us. And I was sort of interested in a little bit of female energy in our otherwise male environment of both dogs and my husband and son being male. So we chose the female, but it was a little bit out of my control. And I think that's just as well, actually. What we could control was her name, and I'm very keen on naming. I think naming a dog is a great part of entering them into your family, right? I've done a little study on names where of the several thousand people who contributed to this study, many of them would contribute part of each member of the family to the dog's name.

57:37And I think that's just wonderful because it's part of like including them right away, right? Conspiratorially, kind of like you're part of us already. And so our way of doing that was we just all chose names of the three humans in our family. We eliminated them in various rounds. And then my son kind of chose the final name, which was Quid. I don't know if he knew what Quid meant exactly, if he'd read it somewhere. He was, I guess he was 10 at the time. But it sounded just like delightful enough. And then with its lengthening as Quiddity as the essence of a thing, it seems like this puppy being the essence of dog was going to really represent her for us.

58:20I was surprised to read that Quid's mother, who had been extremely doting since birth to all of her pups, began to find them irritating as they got older. You know, through reading the book, I began to understand that pups become much better at learning skills from other dogs or even humans, pretty much any dog other than their moms after a certain age. And even free ranging dogs tend to drift away from their mothers. Yeah. And puppies form much longer lasting bonds with their siblings. Is this an advantage from an evolutionary point because of how many puppies get separated from their mothers?

59:04Yeah, a number of interesting things have happened in the transition from wolves to dogs. You know, in wolf packs, often the young wolves will stay with the pack. Wolf packs are really just family packs, multi-generational family packs. Maybe a male will go off and forge his own way. Or female will go off and forge her way with another male. But with dogs, just think about it, they have to be flexible enough to live with another family. And not just another family, but a human family, a family that's not of their species. And the way that dogs have changed in order to accommodate this is kind of twofold.

59:42One, dogs can give birth twice a year, so they go into heat approximately every six months. If that's the case, then you have to imagine that your previous litter had better be pretty well on their way before that next litter comes along. So kind of biology might start the process here. And then secondarily, while that mother dog is taking care of her litter, it's a completely full-time job. I mean, this particular dog, Mays, had 11 puppies. they are born unable to do a thing right they can't see they can't smell they can barely move they could just about lift their head and suckle they can't maintain their own body temperature they can't excrete for themselves their mom has to prompt their excretions and then clean up after them so it's a full-time responsibility with these 11 puppies for several weeks of feeding warming and cleaning them and it's appropriate that as they start to get bigger more capable a few weeks in they can eat food other than milk that she starts to similarly distance herself from them and make things a little more challenging instead of lying down to let them nurse standing up and making them kind of reach for her belly if they want to nurse for instance and then as they get more rambunctious, scolding them a little bit and telling them, you just can't jump on me and bite me all the time, which is the type of thing a parent should do and tell their young ones.

1:01:10And so that's when they start turning to their siblings more and learning more from their siblings. That actually does equip them pretty well to moving on to a different family, a different world. Hopefully in there too, there's an exposure to people, right? And not in every free-ranging population will there be, but ideally in any population of dogs that's being bred or raised from a shelter, there will be humans in there from the very early weeks until they're adopted out so that dogs just know how to interact with them. How traumatic is it to separate a dog from their mother and siblings? I don't think it's hugely traumatic.

1:01:49I mean, I think at its essence, the mom is ready to be done with the pups, is no longer looking to sleep with them, is no longer counting them. Sure, they go toward each other, but I don't think that they're heavily bonded. Siblings too, similarly, they're attached, but not permanently bonded. What I think can be traumatic is that they're going from like this pile of dogs who they live on and around and follow everywhere and who follow them to often these very isolated situations in human families. You know, I thought about it a lot with this puppy. You never saw the dogs not on top of each other when they were sleeping and eating, climbing over each other in full body contact.

1:02:36But one of the first things that we tend to do in America, in 21st century America with dogs is put them in a crate by themselves. And that's very isolating. And I think that's challenging. I think that itself is challenging. But if instead, they get to be proximate to the other warm bodies in the house, it seems to me that the transition is actually often very smooth. You brought Quid home when she was about 10 weeks old and charted her growth from, quote, we grub to boisterous sprite from her birth to her first birthday. And very surprisingly, you found that you didn't quite take to quid right away.

1:03:17I was so surprised by this. Why? This is something that I hadn't anticipated. And I actually struggled with whether to put it in the book. And the book wound up being more of a memoir than I thought it would be, because I included some of this reaction that I had. I just assumed, because I loved visiting the puppies, and I love puppies, and I'm interested in dogs generally, right? I never meet dogs who I don't like, right? Frankly, that never happens, that I would adore this dog. But instead, I was very conscious with the way I was scrutinizing her behavior, hour by hour, day by day of the ways that she was disrupting our family, right?

1:04:03And all the relationships in the family between the dogs, the dogs with the cat, us with the dogs, us with the cat, they were all disrupted by this little chaotic force. Yes. I've been there. Roxanne and I had our biggest fight the weekend we got the dog. Absolutely. It's three days later that everybody says, I think I've made a great mistake. And for me, it lasted longer, I think, because I was less willing to kind of suspend disbelief. And I think I didn't give her the benefit of the doubt, right? I was very, I was almost too attentive. I think this is one place that maybe my kind of scientific gaze, where I was looking at and assessing and analyzing everything, led me to have more difficulty falling in love with her than, for instance, my husband and son, who were immediately smitten and had no trouble.

1:04:55And at the same time, also, Finnegan, who was our older dog, who has been like, who's one of these heart dogs, you know, who I had a terrific relationship with. He's in all of my, every one of my books. And who was at the time 12 and a half, started to suffer from a degenerative disease and he was moving much less well. And I could see his vitality dim, even as hers shone so brightly. And it felt unfair. It felt like an unfair trade to me. And it was hard for me to release that and just take in the kind of joyousness of her presence purely. Quit is two and a half now. How has she changed and what is your relationship like with her now?

1:05:47Oh, well, I love her now. You know, now she's terrific. She's a complete delight, really. She's her own dog. She's not the dog I would have anticipated. She's not the dog I would have chosen. She has energies that are inexplicable to me, could chase a ball until she's exhausted. And I don't understand that. I don't appreciate it. She's not a cerebral dog. she's not she's not a thinker she's uh i think it became easier for me actually to see her for herself after our our older dogs passed which they sadly did about a year ago i know i'm so sorry thank you i uh i wrote an obituary for finnegan yes in the new york times which is absolutely stunning stunning which i think there should be more of frankly because that's a real relationship with a real individual whose death needs marking.

1:06:44And yet, for the same reason, I was able to see her a little bit better. And her grief, actually, right? And her feeling of loss of these siblings, she was quite close to both of them, even though I think that she kind of vexed them as well. After they died, I became closer with Quid. You write about how dogs are not born understanding the Byzantine rules of human social interaction and the rules of our houses and what we consider appropriate behavior. They don't understand the pronouns we put on items. This is my bed. This is your bed. They don't have a clue about the identities we give to objects.

1:07:25That's a shoe, not a shoe toy. One of my favorite moments in the year of the puppy is actually near the end when you offer a list titled, What You Need to Be Prepared for Your Puppy. And I'd like to share that list with our listeners now, if you don't mind. Sure. Sure. Here's Alexandra Horowitz's complete list titled, What You Need to Be Prepared for Your Puppy. Expect that your puppy will not be who you think nor act as you hope. And that is the complete list. Tell us why that is the list. I mean, I'm playing with the fact that there are a lot of books which say, oh, here's the list of sort of items you need to buy or things you need to do to train your dog.

1:08:16And then the whole thing is set, set and done. And you've got the, you know, good dog for life. And I think that that while an attempt to at least superficially prepare people for the upheaval that is adding an individual quadruped wolf descendant to your life, it also is woefully inadequate, really. And the thing that's really happening is that you're adding an individual person to your life who has their own beliefs and feelings and knowledge and awareness and is very young often, right, and doesn't know very much. And the best thing you can do is be patient with them. Give them a little benefit of the doubt and let them learn about your world.

1:08:59Help them learn about your world as you learn about them. that's where the relationship that you want is going to come from. Not in, you know, getting the equipment and doing the simple training. It starts with being open to a new individual. When I first, first, first got my dogs as an adult woman on my own, I didn't know anything about what I was doing. My first dog, Scruffy, was I decided to get him when I was going through depression and thought it might help and bought, I don't know, hundreds of books on dog training and how to be a good dog mom. And then over the years have been given a lot of dog books and have always been interested in sort of the inner lives of dogs.

1:09:44And I do have to say that there's absolutely no comparison to the books that you write and every other book I've ever read on how to understand dogs. And I only wish that I had gotten the year of the puppy before we got Max, it would have helped a great deal. I just have a few more questions for you, and then I'll let you go. Last week, the state of New York banned pet stores from selling dogs, cats, and rabbits. And the ban, which takes effect in December of 2024, is meant to prevent the sale of animals raised by commercial breeders accused of keeping them in inhumane conditions. And I agree with Martha Nussbaum, who says that animals have intrinsic dignity.

1:10:26Aside from this band, how can we help dogs have more dignified existences? That's such a great question. I think the answer is in letting them be themselves a little bit more, leaning into their dogness. And I think one of the difficult things about having a dog in contemporary society is that a lot is asked of them, which is kind of fundamentally antagonistic with who they are, They're asked to stay by themselves for long periods of time, doing nothing, sort of waiting. They're asked to be still when they're young and little, when they can't still their bodies yet. They're asked not to use their mouths when they use their mouths like we use our hands.

1:11:11They're asked not to sniff things when that's their way of seeing the world. I think appreciating that the thing we enjoy about living with dogs is their otherness, is the things that are different about them, rather than just trying to make them into little mini humans. I think that respects their dignity. And that would be the way if I were king of the world, and I could make us change how we deal with dogs, it would be allowing them to roll in that thing now and then and play with other dogs, splash in the puddles, sniff as long as they want to sniff, follow their impulses somewhat more and celebrate them for who they are, not just try to make them somebody they're not.

1:11:54Alexandra, my last question for you is this. Can dogs smile? Yes. They're smiling much of the time. It's just not with their mouth. They're smiling with their tail and body and ears and face, right? They certainly have muscles in their face, which are expressions of a smile. But they, like the dolphin, sometimes look like they're smiling because of their lips. We're very convinced by that. But it's more a full body smile, which is, I think, even more pleasurable. Alexandra Horowitz, thank you so much for doing so much work in the world that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

1:12:39A complete pleasure, Debbie. Thanks. Alexandra Horowitz's latest book is The Year of the Puppy, How Dogs Become Themselves. You can find out more about Alexandra Horowitz and her other marvelous books at alexandrahorowitz.com. You can listen to her podcast called Off Leash, which is wonderful wherever you love podcasts. And you can also see more about the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard at dogcognition.weebly.com. This is the 18th year we've been podcasting Design Matters, and I'd like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both.

1:13:19I'm Debbie Melman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The Editor-in-Chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Wyland. Thank you.