Behan, Kevin. Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves. Novato, Calif: New World Library, 2011. ## Gut-Brain Behan read about the "little brain in the gut" while he was in college. The gut brain was discovered in the nineteenth century. It has half the body's neurons and a full range of neurotransmitters, hormones, and opiate receptor sites. There is a nine-to-one ratio of data transfer from the gut to the brain, compared to the opposite direction. In 1899, anatomists discovered that the digestive system of dogs continued to push material through even when the nerves linking the brain to the intestines were severed. The gut had a mind of its own. Behan considers the gut to be the social brain, because animals that go by the brain in the gut will act in tandem and social behaviour will result. The gut doesn't just digest food. It also digests all the sensory input that is bombarding its central nervous system. When the information can be digested, the animal feels grounded and safe. When the gut is overwhelmed, the animal feels disconnected and in danger. ## Quotes > “Emotion isn’t something that happens inside of us, separate and distinct from what’s happening outside of us. Emotion, nature, and sentience compose one seamless “networked intelligence.” > “Resonating with what one is attracted to is the highest form of intelligence that we may be blessed to experience, no thinking required.” > “The energetic principles of emotion are the operating system of a networked intelligence. Perhaps the most amazing thing I’ve learned from dogs is that the heart, the organ in our chest that pumps our blood, is this network’s brain.” > “as pure energy, emotions are always a positive force of attraction. Moreover, true feelings are always an emotional counterbalance to what one is attracted to, and they always feel good. There’s no such thing as a “bad” feeling; what we consider a “bad” feeling is actually the collapse of a good one.” > "The real reason for the dog in our life is to reveal what instincts, thoughts, and judgments prevent us from feeling what is at the very bottom of our heart." > "How individuals respond to the way unresolved emotion makes them feel determines how they create their “network.” Our dog’s behavior and personality are not a function of its own self-contained agency of mind; in reality, our dog is acting out, in its own way, the unresolved emotion that disturbs us, as its owner. Dogs evolved to resolve unresolved emotion because resolving unresolved emotion is how nature evolves.” > “every animal has access to the same, universal code of emotion, a monolithic “force” of attraction, like gravity, that creates meaningful bonds and is responsible for altruism and the cooperative impulse. However, in most species when a situation gets too intense, instincts or old habits take over and preclude the animal’s capacity to “go by feel.” > “When emotion collapses and instincts crowd out feelings, it is the source of all the strife we see in nature, and I daresay in society.” > “Finally, the neonatal lust for physical contact, as evidenced by puppies pressing together into one writhing mass to maintain body warmth, is the essence of a sensual/sexual and therefore a social nature. Turning resistance into a feeling is a function of a sexual nature, a transmutation occurring through a raw, physical sensuality, a craving, an absolute lust for physical contact (as the owner of every healthy puppy soon discovers) — an animal magnetism that compels it toward others and then induces it to align around a common want. So the reason infantile traits can migrate into adulthood and become fixed features of a mature disposition is because sexuality is but an elaboration of the neoteny phenomenon. I believe this is because fundamentally sexuality is about synchronizing highly coordinated group activity more than it is about reproduction.” > “When two beings want the same thing, they can communicate. And when two beings want the same thing that neither can attain on their own, they can connect. A want held in common weaves life into one network, a worldwide web of feeling.” > “Before patrol dogs were deployed in the Philippine jungles — mostly Doberman pinschers, then also called “devil dogs” — the life expectancy of a point man on patrol was seven hours. After the trained dogs were assigned to the patrols, a point man was never lost to ambush.” > “Studying what was known about animals, he [my father] early on recognized the imprint of the wolf in the domestic dog, and he eventually rejected the conventional view of his time that the wolf was the big, bad monster as in “Li’l Red Riding Hood.” I grew up hearing him say to clients and in public presentations that “outside of rabies, there is not one documented case of a wolf ever attacking a human.” > “I cannot overstate this point: all energy in nature, and emotion is no exception, is based on attraction. Electricity runs to ground, magnets leap to metal, water seeks its own level, mass is drawn to mass, paired photons operate in phase. If everything in nature runs on attraction, how could the nature of animals be different?” > “The acquisition of unresolved emotion is the default function of consciousness, since dealing with resistance to both physical and emotional movement is the story of life on planet Earth. Every animal is an emotional heat sink, its body/mind an “emotional battery” containing unresolved emotion as the physical, cellular memory of any degree of resistance it has experienced.” > “I would argue that animals should be viewed more as carriers of an emotional charge than they are carriers of genes. Animals are biostatic emotional batteries more than they are gene machines.” > “The information in the body/mind, as an emotional battery, is a physical record of resistance, analogous to an emotional GPS device embedded in an animal’s mind to record a topographic map of its emotional experiences, the gradient ledger of how much resistance it has experienced and where.”