Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [103]
We can begin to make up for our human disadvantage in understanding the dog's sensory umwelt by trying to startle our sensory systems. For instance, to escape our bad habits of seeing things roughly in the same colors every day, expose yourself to a room lit by only one color—say a narrow bandwidth of yellow. The colors of objects under such light are washed out: your own hands are drained of their blood-filled vitality; pink dresses turn dully white; face stubble stands out like pepper in a bowl of milk. The familiar is made foreign. But for the yellow glow from above, this is much closer to what it might be like to have a dog's color perception.
… It is in the moment …
Ironically, attention to details may preclude an ability to generalize from the details. Sniffing the trees, the dog does not see the forest. Specificity of place and object is useful when you want to calm your dog on a road trip: you can bring his favored pillow to help calm him. A feared object or person put in a new context can sometimes be reborn as unscary.
That same specificity might indicate that dogs do not think abstractly—about that which is not directly in front of them. The influential analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that though a dog can believe that you are on the other side of the door, we cannot sensibly talk of his ruminating on it: believing that you will be there in two days' time. Well, let's eavesdrop on that dog. He has slowly zigzagged through the house since you left. He has run through all the interesting unchewed surfaces in the room. He has visited the armchair, where food was once left unattended long ago, and the couch, where food was spilled last night. He has napped six times, had three visits to the water bowl, lifted his head twice at faraway barks. Now he hears your shuffling approach of the door, quickly confirms by nose that it is you, and remembers that each time he hears and smells you, you appear visually next.
In sum, he believes that you are there. It is nonsense to suggest otherwise. Wittgenstein's doubt is not that dogs have beliefs. They have preferences, make judgments, distinguish, decide, refrain: they think. Wittgenstein's doubt is that before you arrive, your dog is anticipating your arrival: pondering it. It is doubt that dogs have beliefs about things not happening right now.
To live without the abstract is to be consumed by the local: facing each event and object as singular. It is roughly what it means to live in the moment—to live life unburdened by reflection. If it is so, then it would be fair to say that dogs are not reflective. Though they experience the world, they are not also considering their own experiences. While thinking, they are not consulting their own thoughts: thinking about thinking.
Dogs come to learn the cadence of a day. But the nature of a moment—the experience of moments—is different when olfaction is your primary sense. What feels like a moment to us may be a series of moments to an animal with a different sensory world. Even our "moments" are briefer than seconds; they are the duration of a noticeable instant, perhaps the smallest distinguishable time unit, as we normally experience the world. Some suggest that this is measurable: it is an eighteenth of a second, the length of time a visual stimulus has to be presented to us before we consciously acknowledge it. Thus we barely notice a blink of an eye, at a tenth of a second long. By this logic, with a higher flicker-fusion rate, a visual moment is briefer and quicker for dogs. In dog time each moment lasts less long, or, to put it another way, the next moment happens sooner. For dogs, "right now" happens before we know it.
… It is fleeting and fast …
For dogs, perspective, scale, and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction—but olfaction is fleeting: it exists in a different time scale. Scents don't arrive with the same even regularity as (under normal conditions) light does to our eyes. This means that in their scent-vision they are seeing