CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Erin Hecht was a scientist long before she even knew the meaning of the word. The world outside her childhood home in Mansfield served as her first laboratory.
As a little girl, she loved running in the woods. She explored creeks, searched for small animals and found insects like caterpillars to put in little boxes to study.
That search for knowledge and understanding launched her path from local forests and creeks to graduation from Mansfield St. Peter’s High School in 2002 to her own neuroscience laboratory at Harvard University — and a prominent role in the new Netflix documentary, “Inside the Mind of a Dog.”
“I thought it looked like it was going to be a high-quality production,” Hecht said Friday during a phone interview. “I think they did a fantastic job.”
The 75-minute film, narrated by actor Rob Lowe, takes a deep dive into the 15,000-year relationship between humans and dogs, a journey that began the first time a curious and hungry wolf approached fearful humans and took advantage of the marvelous food scraps people left behind.
Over time, as the canis lupus evolved into the canis familaris, the survival of the fittest became the survival of the friendliest.
The two species, human being and domesticated canine, became inseparable, a bond fully explored in the documentary made by four-time Emmy award winner Andy Mitchell, the creator of a similar project inside the minds of cats two years ago.
Hecht said she enjoyed the cat documentary, a fact that played a role in her decision to participate in the canine version. She’s in charge of the Canine Brains Project inside the evolutionary neuroscience Hecht Laboratory, which performs non-invasive MRIs to study dog brains.
“They emailed me and asked I would be willing to do it. It sounded like a good thing,” said Hecht, who earned her Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta in 2013 and works for the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard.
“The cat documentary was very well done. It didn’t look like it was misrepresenting science or dumbing things down,” she said.
From Mansfield to San Diego to Atlanta and beyond
So how did Hecht, a childhood friend and St. Peter’s classmate of Iditarod racer Matthew Failor, made the decision to study dogs after initially earning a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science from the University of California-San Diego in 2006?
For motivation, she credits teachers at St. Peter’s, which she attended from kindergarten through high school in a city where her mother and grandmother still live.
“I appreciated the education I got at St. Pete’s and I enjoyed growing up in Mansfield,” singling out high school math teacher Jerry Bradner, who died in 2023 at age 59 after a long illness, as well as English teachers Judy Castle and Liz Castle.
“They all made an impression on me,” Hecht said.
Her initial thought going into college was to be a physicist. That plan changed once the college bell rang.
“Classes were more than I had anticipated and being a physicist was basically just gonna be a mathematician. I wasn’t really going to be doing experiments in the way that I thought scientists did experiments,” she said.
“Meanwhile, I had a job working in a research lab that used EEGs to study brain activity in kids. I took that job just kind of to make money, not necessarily because I was specifically interested in it, but then I kind of fell in love with it.
“So I switched over to cognitive studies,” Hecht said.
“I don’t necessarily have my sights set on becoming a career scientist. I was just in college and I was doing what I thought was interesting.
“I worked in a research lab all through college and I enjoyed that and I thought, well, seems like I could enjoy going to grad school, but I wasn’t sure if I would get a scholarship or not or how I would pay for it.
“So I applied to grad school, hoping that I would have some affordable option and it turned out that I did. So I wound up with Emory,” Hecht said.
“If I hadn’t gotten into a grad school, or if it had turned out to be not affordable, I probably would have done something else,” she said.
‘I got to learn a lot about neuroscience’
At Emory, Hecht was again impacted by a teacher, a scientist named Lisa Parr, her Ph.D. advisor and mentor.
“She really kind of encouraged me to stretch my wings as a scientist. She challenged me. I did neuroimaging research with chimpanzees, non-invasive work, the same way we are doing with dogs now,” Hecht said.
“It was an amazing opportunity to get to interact with the type of animal that most people don’t get to interact with so closely. I was looking at how chimpanzee brains are similar to human brains to understand what makes humans different among the rest of the animal kingdom,” she said.
“I really got to learn a lot about neuroscience. I got to learn how to do research, which has a lot of practical ins and outs that you don’t learn from just reading a textbook.”
After earning her doctorate, Hecht participated in two research fellowships which helped prepare her for more independent work as a scientist at Emory and Georgia State.
Along the way, Hecht saw a documentary about the work of Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev, who in 1959 began an experiment to study the process of domestication, using the silver fox as his subject.
“Starting with a population of ranched foxes from fur farms, Belyaev bred only the tamest animals, gauging them based on their reactions to and interactions with human handlers. His results were astounding – by the 6th generation of breeding, a portion of the fox pups were competing with each other, vying for the attention of their handlers, much like dogs,” according to the study.
“I was watching this TV show, which was talking about dogs and evolution and genetics and behavior and domestication. It talked about the fox experiments. They were showing video of the foxes and how friendly they were with people.
“There was a lot of science on the TV show … but there was no neuroscience. I thought, ‘This is crazy. How is nobody studying the brains of these animals?’ I couldn’t believe no one was doing it yet,” Hecht said.
“(Dogs) beg to be analyzed. You find yourself constantly thinking about what goes on in their heads,” she told the Harvard Gazette in 2019.
Unlocking the mystery: Does your dog actually love you?
She reached out to the Russian research institute for more information on the study. She contacted local veterinarians to see if they had MRIs of dogs she could analyze.
The Canine Brains Project was actually launched at Georgia State while she was a grad student.
“This started in grad school and I slowly started putting together the pieces of canine research program together. I was also writing funding applications for federal research funding to study it … and eventually I was successful in being funded,” Hecht said.
“That allowed us to start collecting data at a much more rapid pace. I started doing my own MRI scans at the University of Georgia. After a couple of years, Harvard invited me to apply for a job,” she said.
“I love animals. I thought dogs would be a really cool thing to study. Like primates, dogs have large brains, they have complex behavior and cognition.
“But you don’t have to house them in a research facility. They can just live in their natural environments in people’s homes or on farms, wherever their natural place is.
“They could just visit the lab for a day to (allow us to) collect data. It sort of felt more naturalistic than housing animals and in a research environment,” Hecht said.
@harvard What is your dog’s personality like? Assistant Professor Erin Hecht explains what dogs’ brains tell us about their personalities. #Harvard #HarvardUniversity #Evolution #Dog #Dogs #DogsOfTikTok #Puppy #Puppies #Biology #WorkingDog #DogBreeds #Brain #Study #Neuroscience ♬ original sound – Harvard
Dogs have made for great lab partners, work that includes behavior tests as well as brain scans.
“(Dogs) have evolved to live with humans. So in many cases, they’re better than the other primates. They understand human communication better because they live their whole lives with humans. They are kind of hard-wired to understand humans.
“With primates, like chimpanzees, it’s not really natural for them to be in close contact with humans. They’re not wired for that. They are wired to communicate with other chimps. That communication is complex. They’re just not as good at communicating with us (as dogs), Hecht said.
The Netflix documentary producers spent a day with Hecht and her multi-disciplinary team at Harvard, which includes other scientists, veterinary practitioners, students, trainers and handlers.
“They had all kinds of cameras and microphones and helpers. It was really something to see. Everyone in our lab helped put together the situations they filmed. It was really exciting,” she said.
The documentary also tells viewers that the Canine Brains Project is looking for new dogs to study — and that travel expenses to the lab may be available. Interested dog owners can complete an online form, which will help Hecht and her team determine if the canine would be a good fit.
“We have never done anything this high profile,” she said. “I don’t know how it will go, but it would be fantastic if it brings more people and dogs to our lab.”
And to answer the question, of course your dog loves you.
Scientists have found when a dog and a human are bonded, each touch and each bit of eye contact causes their bodies to release the powerful hormone oxytocin — the “love chemical” that also promotes bonding between mother and child and is known to lower heart rate and blood pressure.
Petting increases levels of the hormone dopamine, sometimes referred to as a feel-good chemical, and endorphins in both dogs and humans.
“When people want to know ‘what is my dog thinking,’ I think what they’re asking is, ‘does my dog love me? I love him,'” said Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University.
“The answer is ‘absolutely.’ It’s remarkably similar to how we experience the relationship. They have these social bonds that with us, that they find them intensely rewarding.”
So what comes next for Dr. Erin Hecht?
“I hope I am doing research for as long as I am a scientist,” said Hecht, who also teaches one class per semester, including one on dog behavior.
“I feel like I won the lottery. I can’t believe I get paid to do this. It’s so much fun, working with the dogs and and all of the other scientists and students in this field. It’s really great,” said Hecht, admitting the work involves frequently seeking research grants.
“I’ll be doing (grant applications) until I retire,” she said with a laugh.
What’s been the biggest surprise from her canine brain research?
“I think the one thing that continues to amaze me is how they manage to use their brain in so many similar ways as humans. They navigate the same environments. They navigate the same social situations. They communicate with us. They interpret our facial expressions and our tone of voice.
“A lot of things they are doing with their brains are the same things we are doing with our brains.”
