PDTE 2011 July Newsletter

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PDTE AGM MEETING In SPAIN 25 – 26 September 2010 firing down the neuron for the synapse to be activated. It’s a bit like a telephone. When it rings, nothing will happen until you answer it. When you do, the electricity is converted to sound waves. In the case of a neuron, the electricity is converted to chemicals. How often a pathway in the brain has electricity going down it affects how strong the connection is. If electricity doesn’t travel down a pathway very often, the connections are quite weak. But if it travels down it often, the connection becomes very strong. For example, imagine you are walking through a field of grass that is up to your waist, and nobody has crossed that field before. It’s quite heavy going and you really have to push your way through. Afterwards you can only just make out where you walked. If the next day you take exactly the same path, it will be a little easier and a little more obvious. If you continue doing this every day, before long you have a well-trodden path through the field, with no resistance to you travelling along it. This analogy helps us understand how neuron connections strengthen through use. This is relevant for memory, and the basis of rehearsal. Donald Hebb discovered that these connections between cells, the synapses, are plastic. They are malleable and changeable. And if you use one of these connections they grow stronger, and if you don’t they grow weaker. We call that SYNAPTIC PLASTICITY “USE IT OR LOSE IT” When pathways grow stronger because they are used, this is called LONG-TERM POTENTIATION. But if a pathway grows weaker because it is not used, this is called LONG-TERM DEPRESSION. Note that this has nothing to do with emotional depression, like when we feel sad. Long-term potentiation is what happens when you learn to ride a bike. You’re rubbish at it to start with. You fall off all the time, but you practise and practise Page 20 and you get better at it. It’s the same with playing a musical instrument. You are not very good at it in the beginning, because the connections along those pathways are very weak. The more you practise, the stronger those connections get and the better you get at playing the instrument. This applies to our dogs too. If your dog practises raiding the fridge every day, he gets very good at it. If he practises chasing cats then he gets very good at that. When he practises doing agility, and keeping his paws on the yellow mark, he gets better at that. We have an expression for it in English: Practice makes perfect In terms of making new memories, there are some parts of the brain that are more important than others. HIPPOCAMPUS Hippocampus is Latin for seahorse, and describes pretty well what this little part of the brain looks like. The Hippocampus is probably the most important part of the brain in relation to memory. Earlier, we looked at types of memory (declarative and procedural). The hippocampus converts relevant information into long-term memory. We have already seen that dogs appear to have episodic memory and procedural memory, not semantic memory, but all of it is transferred into long-term memories by the hippocampus. Information comes into our dogs through any of the five senses: sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. This information gets passed straight to the front part of the brain, the main “curly” part of the brain that we call the CORTEX When the cortex gets information, it passes it on to the hippocampus. If the hippocampus passes the information back to the cortex, a new pathway has been made and that information is now stored as a memory. If it needs to be reused, it gets reactivated and more electricity goes down it. This process by which the hippocampus makes new pathways into the cortex is called CONSOLIDATION Of course once the information is passed to the cortex an1d stored there, there has to be a way to retrieve it. This process is called RETRIEVAL. Remember those slots we talked about earlier? They seem to be in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is pulling information out of the cortex, combining it with information currently coming in through the senses and that combination is your WORKING MEMORY. The other thing the hippocampus is incredibly important for is SPATIAL MAPPING. Very interestingly, studies have been done on Black Cab drivers in London. Any of you who have been to London will know that the Black Cab is quite a famous sight there. But you may not know that Black Cab drivers spend 2-3 years learning all of the roads in London, and how to get from any one place to another without consulting a map. This is called ‘THE KNOWL- EDGE’. They spend years gaining it, and the final test is incredibly hard. You cannot be licensed as a Black Cab driver without having passed it. This is of interest because when the brains of Black Cab drivers were compared against people who don’t have The Knowledge, the cab drivers had much larger hippocampuses. The hippocampus seems to be the place involved in storing maps in the brain. SALIENT MEMORIES If something is really valuable, almost life-threateningly so, you will remember it with one go. Think of a dog hit by a car while crossing the street. The dog experiences extreme fear and pain. You can imagine how that would be a very salient, important memory for the dog. The main organ in the brain responsible for this is the AMYGDALA This little structure next to the hippocampus is almond-shaped (which is what the Latin means). Highly emotional events, PDTE NEWS
PDTE AGM MEETING In SPAIN 25 – 26 September 2010 particularly fear, are dealt with by the amygdala, and they can be recalled instantly if necessary. A threatening stimulus detected by any of the five senses can be fast-tracked and prioritised in the brain by the amygdala. It is responsible for detecting and assisting storage of fear-based memories. Recent research has shown that large amounts of long-term potentiation (strengthening of synapses), occur inside the amygdala. To recap, then, in the main, long-term memories are kept in the cortex and retrieved by the hippocampus. It’s a fairly long and complex pathway. But when there is a fear memory, that pathway can be bypassed because the memory is stored in, or around the amygdala and retrieved much faster. Why this is important to us as trainers and behaviourists is because when an animal undergoes a negative and fear-inducing experience, he will remember it very quickly and very clearly. We all know that when an animal has learnt something equals pain or something equals fear, it seems to get stuck with that memory forever. I have worked with many dogs that have had severe aggression problems. They find it really hard ever to let go of those memories. If something really bad has happened to them, it is much harder to fix. So, if your dog has a memory of a dog attack, it seems likely that this will be stored in connections inside or around the amygdala. If we try to train the dog to associate the attacking dog with good memories through some retraining programme, we are likely to end up making connections from the hippocampus to the cortex. Now your dog has two different memories stored in two different places, and the amygdala is the shorter pathway with the faster access. And that may well be why some dogs with fear-based problems seem to struggle to learn something new. That doesn’t mean they can’t, but it doesn’t mean that you are a bad trainer when you can’t get a dog over a problem. The amygdala is saying, “Never let go of this, never let go of this, NEVER let go of this. It’s really, really important!” MEMORIES AND CONTEXT We associate certain smells with different contexts. For example, if you smell some kind of soap, it may remind you of your mother’s bathroom, shampoo, a hospital room, or something else entirely. Different people associate different stimuli such as a particular smell with completely different memories. Why does that matter? It matters because we don’t hold memories as individual, isolated things. We put memories in context. So when we think about a dog that gets attacked by a cat, the dog doesn’t just learn about the cat. There were many other things going on in that dog’s environment at the time of the attack, which it will associate with that attack in future: the smell of the cat, the colour of the cat, the way it moved, where the dog was at the time, the fact that the owner was carrying a shopping bag, the fact that the dog was on a lead, the owner had white trainers on — all manner of things could be linked with the cat attack. Of course what things exactly it will remember will be dependant on that dog — what it was paying attention to at that time. Think of the dog’s 5-7 slots. They are always filled, so which ones were filled at the time of the cat attack will have an effect dependent on the individual dog. Whatever stimuli were in those slots at the time will always be linked with e.g. the place of attack. Next time he walks into that place, he will associate that place with being attacked. When he arrives at that place, all the associated stimuli will be pulled into his working memory again: What the cat looked like, how it moved, what it smelled like, what other things were in the environment he noticed at the time. Whatever it is that he remembers, and has associated with the attack, is what is going to be pulled into his working memory, and it will have a behavioural effect on the dog. People often say, “My dog doesn’t want to go in the garden. I don’t know why he won’t go there.” or: “My dog doesn’t like going in the car, and I haven’t a clue why!” It’s really quite common that as trainers or behaviourists we get presented with the associated stimuli causing a problem from the owner’s perspective when actually it may not have been that stimulus that was the initial cause. It’s just become associated because of what happened in the environment at the same time of the relevant experience for the dog. Other stimuli that are present at the same time as a main stimulus, and that keep returning to the dog’s memory, make up what we call: ASSOCIATIVE LONG-TERM POTENTIATION There are two main reasons why this is important to us as dog trainers: One has to do with training cues, like an example of teaching our dog to lie down in different places. We don’t want him to associate lying down with a television in the room, or a certain sofa, or a certain carpet, or the owner standing in a certain place. We want the dog to only associate lying down with a specific ‘cue’ given by us as the owner or trainer. The other has to do with fixing problems. We quite often have to fix associated stimuli as well as the main stimulus. So when we look at separation anxiety as an example, we need to fix the fear of being alone. We can get another dog and perhaps that resolves most of the problem. Or we can teach the dog to be alone for 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, etc. But that dog may still remain fearful of having the door shut on him, or he may still be fearful of the owner putting her makeup on (a common sign an owner is about to go out!). Sometimes we have to work on those associated stimuli as well. The problem is, if we miss one or two of those associated stimuli, we won’t necessarily fix the unwanted, ‘problem’ behaviour. In the main, fixing the main stimulus helps, and we look at that later. But we have to be aware of these associated stimuli because they are relevant when fixing problems or training something new. Amber has promised continuing articals to Newsletter no 19 in spring 2012. PDTE NEWS Page 21
Page 1 and 2: PDTE NEWS JULY 2011 l Issue 17 www.
Page 3 and 4: BOARD’S CORNER Contents: Board´s
Page 5 and 6: WElCOME OUR NEW MEMBERS Charlotte A
Page 7 and 8: WELCOME OUR NEW MEMBERS Ronja Hypp
Page 9 and 10: WELCOME OUR NEW MEMBERS dog trainin
Page 11 and 12: What‘s up in 2011? PDTE Events, C
Page 13 and 14: What‘s up in 2011? Other Events,
Page 15 and 16: Home stories... she was checking up
Page 17 and 18: PDTE AGM MEETING MEMORY In SPAIN MA
Page 19: PDTE AGM MEETING In SPAIN 25 - 26 S
Page 23 and 24: Attachments and Relationships initi
Page 25 and 26: Animal Cops in Holland Nelis Verhoe
Page 27 and 28: Living with Newfoundlands quence ma
Page 29 and 30: Canine Gut Flora Nicole Mackie, Eng
Page 31 and 32: IS MY DOG TRYING TO DOMINATE ME? hu

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