All sorts of crazy mechanisms on how dogs mirror/map human emotional states
- the oxytocin-gaze positive feedback loop - eye contact with your dog raises your oxytocin, which leads you to pet/play more, which increases dog’s oxytocin which …
- the reverse for cortisol - dogs can sniff out stress which leads them to get stressed themselves which …
- potentially the coolest - dogs exhibit neural synchrony where their brain rhythms seem to share resonant frequencies with humans, as seen in hyperscanning EEG setups

X · 21 September 2026

The coolest of those deserves its own thread, from 2024:

Coolest study of the year - LSD given to autistic dogs restores their brain synchrony with humans as measured by EEG

had a hunch for the past 2 years that if we did an interspecies hyperscanning EEG setup that involves measuring from a dog and human, you'd be able to derive a quantitative measure of their relationship dynamic, love that Ren and colleagues took this to the bank

@emergir_co and I explored this speculatively along with @Lauveri and @RaulHernandezP last year x.com/…

but this paper goes a lot further than inter-species hyperscanning, they go on to show that dogs carrying the shank3 gene, correlated w autism, decreases the inter-brain coupling measured by EEG

even one of the above two would have made for a great paper but the absolute best part is that they then gave the autistic dogs LSD

i've written before about how free-ranging dogs in mexico have been observed to nip on psilocybin mushroom caps and then get into howling circles, as well as how certain indigenous groups in the Amazon hunt with their dogs after an Ayahuasca sesh

psychedelic mediated technology leveraged inter-species relations is my fav jam of them all

turns out the LSD restores the inter-brain coupling that you find in non-autistic dogs

none of this is v surprising to me but i'm absolutely thrilled someone went ahead and did Science and made these links - super excited for the possibility space here!!! so much more to be done

X · 14 September 2024 · thread of 9

The rest of the dog–mind work is on the building page.