Dr. Ben Rein
To learn about the neuroscience behind our relationships with our “fur babies” (turns out that cutesy term is actually scientifically sound), we talked to neuroscientist Ben Rein, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. On his popular TikTok account, @dr.brein (get it?) demystifies an organ typically shrouded in mystery. We asked Dr. Rein about neurochemical bonds, his own relationships with dogs, and what’s really going on inside their heads.
First things first, do you have a pet?
I have a dog, Zoey. She's part Border Collie, part Lab, part Pointer. My wife and I rescued her. She's about two and a half years old now and just a lovely, sweet, little dog.
Did you have pets or a dog growing up?
Yes, I was raised in a home with five animals – three dogs and two cats. My parents got them all the same time, so I grew up with them and had them for a large portion of my adolescence. I've had a lifetime of animals and pets.
We’ll get back to dogs and pets, but first, we’d love to know a bit more about your background. You’re a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University with a big public following. How did you get interested in neuroscience?
I originally got into neuroscience because I was interested in social behavior. Growing up, I was always amazed that you could look around a room, let's say a middle school cafeteria, and see the variability in social behavior. You can see the tables of really outgoing, loud, well-liked students who all clustered together and didn't mind the attention spotlight. And then there were groups of students who were much quieter and maybe had a little bit more difficulty interacting. I found myself to be more outgoing and personable, and I wondered what the difference was between what was happening in my brain when I talked to someone and what was happening in the brain of the shyest person in my grade.
I got my start in neuroscience studying autism spectrum disorder. I got to answer the questions that I had always been curious about and dive into the social systems in the brain and understand how they operate. Most recently, I've moved into studying empathy and how certain drugs like MDMA can enhance empathy, which is a project that I'm just about to publish now.
You spend a lot of time sharing research and debunking misinformation on your social media accounts. Why do you think it’s important for scientists to engage with the public?
I spent many years being a traditional academic researcher who didn’t engage with the public at all. I got started on social media sort of inadvertently when I posted a video on TikTok that went viral. I wasn't really trying to be an influencer, but I was chosen by the algorithm gods, and it all started from there. As soon as I started posting and interacting with the public, and engaging with the science side of social media, I realized that there was a huge gap, not only in the representation of scientists on social media, but also in the quality of scientific information that was being presented and shared.
I found that high-quality, peer reviewed scientific papers were almost never discussed. And if they were discussed, they were commonly misinterpreted and misrepresented. I found that to be a huge problem, so I started answering questions and doing my best to clarify what a good scientific answer looks like.
"In my view, everything comes down to the brain, especially your mood and mental health."
With the rise in popularity of Dr. Andrew Huberman’s podcast and brain boosting supplements on the market, why do you think there’s a growing interest in the brain right now?
It's impossible to give a true data-driven, scientific answer to this, but Huberman did something huge for science, which was to bring in a totally new audience. He's shown people that science can be used to further enhance their well-being, so all of a sudden, neuroscience has been sucked into this tornado of optimization and wellness.
A lot of our wellness stems from this organ – the brain – that has historically been shrouded in mystery. In my view, everything comes down to the brain, especially your mood and mental health. To get people to learn that they should do certain things to improve their brain health and interrogate their own well-being is extremely valuable.
With that in mind, what’s one thing our community can do for a healthier brain?
The absolute critical thing that you must do is get good sleep. It all starts there. I sleep eight to nine hours a night, every single night. I go to bed at the same exact time; I don't watch TV in bed; I try to avoid screens. I do everything I can to optimize my circadian rhythm and my sleep patterns, and that has unquestionably been huge for me.
One simple piece of advice is to figure out how much sleep you're getting right now, and then just do whatever seems like a reasonable step up. If you're getting six hours of sleep, try to get six and a half. If you're getting eight hours of sleep, get eight hours and 15 minutes. If you're getting five hours of sleep, maybe go in for six or seven hours. And also recognize that when you lay down at midnight and get out of bed at 6am, you did not sleep for six hours. You probably slept for five hours. Optimize your sleep environment: Make sure it's dark. Make sure there are no noises; if there are a lot of background ambient noises like road noise that you can't avoid, consider using a white noise machine. That’s my advice: Start with sleep.
Can you explain what’s happening in the brain when we create a powerful, positive bond – with a person or an animal?
Generally, what happens when we create a really strong, powerful, positive bond is that certain chemicals are released in the body, specifically oxytocin, which has been called the love hormone. It's a very powerful molecule for social bonding that creates this really incredible feeling of closeness and togetherness and union. If we were trying to identify the one key factor that distinguishes an amazing, deep bond with someone versus what we feel when we pass someone on the street, it would probably be that molecule, oxytocin.
The other thing that happens – and there's still a lot of research needed to figure out exactly what's going on – is something called interbrain synchrony. If you measure brain activity from two people while they're interacting, there is data to suggest that their patterns of brain activity will synchronize when they're engaged in a deep, powerful connection. You hear people say they just vibe with someone, and this is almost the same thing – the patterns of brain activity, the oscillations, are vibing together; they're becoming entrained.
What kinds of neurochemicals are released when we bond with dogs? What do they do and how long do their effects last?
There was a paper published in “Science” in 2015 that showed when dog owners stared into the eyes of their dogs, the humans and the dogs showed increased levels of oxytocin. This is akin to the deep, evolutionary mechanism at play when a mother holds their baby for the first time. It's very important for the mother and the baby to feel bonded, otherwise no one's going to take care of the baby. The brain releases oxytocin so that the mother feels a strong bond to the baby and the baby feels a strong bond to the mother. What's funny is that the same exact thing is seen in dogs, which implies that, somewhere along the road, dogs hijacked this bonding system in the human brain to bond with us the way we bond with our children. The neurobiology of that interaction is very similar to what you would experience with a human baby – and not only any baby but your baby.
There's more evidence from this paper that's also interesting. To confirm what they had observed, the researchers gave the dogs intranasal oxytocin, and this increased the amount of time that the dog spent staring at their owners and gazing into their eyes. What's really, really neat is that they did the same experiment with wolves that were raised by humans. They found that when the humans and the wolves gazed into each other's eyes, the wolf did not show oxytocin release, which suggests that at some point in their evolution from wolves to domesticated dogs, dogs developed this magnificent ability to connect with us in a very special and unique way.
So through the production of oxytocin, dogs and humans can bond with each other in a really powerful way. Is that right?
Yes! In another study, subjects interacted with a random dog. They were allowed to talk softly and play gently with it, scratch their ears, that sort of thing – versus a control where they had the same person sit and read a book. They wanted to measure how much certain chemicals, like endorphins and oxytocin, were being produced in the human and the dog. They found that after a 5–24 minute interaction, blood pressure was reduced in both the dog and the human; both of them relaxed cardiovascularly. They also measured blood levels of beta endorphin, which is an endogenous opioid that makes us feel good. Beta endorphin levels in the blood increased significantly in both the dog and human – they were about two and a half times higher in both the dog and the human. They also looked at oxytocin levels, which were about twice as high in the humans and five times as high in the dogs after the interaction. And then they looked at dopamine levels, which were about 30% higher in the humans and nearly twice as high in the dogs.
Would it be fair to characterize what’s happening as a positive feedback loop? The human's happiness contributes to the dog's happiness and the dog's happiness contributes to the human's happiness and all of that is helping them both chill out and relax?
Totally. Growing up, one of my one of my three dogs was a miniature Beagle named Bailey. My family rescued her from an abusive home where she had been beaten – not a good place for her to be. I had such a strong bond with her growing up, and I could see in her behavior and her facial expressions that our interactions were just as therapeutic for her as they were for me. She trusted me. I watched her develop emotionally from this very fearful, timid beast into a compassionate, loving pet. It is a feedback loop: Both the human and the dog are experiencing pleasure and reward from the connection, and there's evolutionary reasons for it. There are theories that dogs were domesticated because it was mutually beneficial. They got food scraps and humans got protection and companionship.
Do dogs help to regulate your nervous system? For example, does petting a dog actually calm you down and decrease anxiety?
“Dogs have a calming effect on the human mind and body. They can actually regulate your heart rate and blood pressure in real time.”
In short, yes: Dogs have a calming effect on the human mind and body. If you sample people who have dogs versus those who don't have dogs, those with dogs are less likely to die from any cause, but specifically from cardiovascular disease. This is similar to research on loneliness. People who live alone are much more likely to die within a given timeframe. Of course, loneliness isn't killing them, but loneliness can contribute to an increase in blood pressure and risk of heart attack or stroke. Dogs address that need. They provide companionship and company, and there's even a little bit of evidence suggesting that having pets might increase your outcome if you do have a heart attack or stroke.
Studies show that dogs can actually regulate your heart rate and blood pressure in real time. They take the pressure and stress off of you. In one study, they put people through an arithmetic challenge and physical cold challenge; some of the participants were in the presence of their pet and some were not. They found that the participants who were with their pets actually had less of a stress response, and their heart rates didn't go as high. So it makes sense that over the long term with a dog, you're going to see cardiovascular benefits, which is incredible.
Service dogs provide an invaluable amount of comfort and support to their humans. What do you know about the work of service dogs specifically trained to help people with neurological impairments? Epilepsy, dementia, etc.
There are a lot of neurological conditions that therapy dogs can help with, and two of the more interesting ones to me are epilepsy and narcolepsy. Epilepsy is when you have seizures, and narcolepsy is when you fall asleep uncontrollably. Therapy dogs can be trained to identify very subtle shifts in behavior that may alert them to an impending seizure or loss of consciousness. With epilepsy, this means being attuned to very minute changes happening deep in the brain that can trigger a seizure. I found a paper suggesting that dogs may detect an odor coming from someone with epilepsy before they have a seizure. They can sense something happening – maybe it's a distress signal and pheromone thing. I just find it amazing that they can connect with us in that way.
Illustrations by Leah Goren for Kismet
Where my dogs at?
