Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [90]
Dog years (About their past and future)
As we round the corner Pump stops in her tracks. She moves as if to sniff something a half-step back; I slow to indulge her; and she darts back around the corner. There are still twelve blocks, a brief park, a water fountain, and a right turn until we get there, but she knows this walk. She'd been glancing up at me for blocks, and with that final turn, it's confirmed. We're going to the vet.
Psychologists report that those people with the most prodigious memories—able to flawlessly recite a string of hundreds of random numbers read to them once, as well as identifying every moment the reader blinked, swallowed, or scratched his head—are sometimes the most tortured by what they recall. The complement of remembering so thoroughly can be the strange inability to forget anything at all. Every event, every detail, piles on the garbage heaps that are their memories.
The overflowing garbage, collector of the day's past, is more than a little evocative when considering the memory of a dog. For if anything is on the dog's mind, it is that wonderful, odoriferous pile that we teasingly preserve in our kitchens, off-limits to the dog as a special form of torture. In that pile go the leavings of so many dinners, the extra-rank cheese that was discovered in the back of the fridge, clothes that have smelled too much for too long to be worn. Everything goes there but nothing is organized.
Is the dog's memory like this? At some level, it just might be. There is clear evidence that dogs remember. Your dog plainly recognizes you on your return home. Every owner knows that their dog won't forget where that favored toy was left, or what time dinner is supposed to be delivered. He can forge a shortcut en route to the park; remember the good peeing posts and quiet squatting sites; identify dog friends and foes at a glance and a sniff.
However, the reason we even pose the question "Do dogs remember?" is that there is more to our memory than keeping track of valued items, familiar faces, and places we've been. There is a personal thread running through our memories: the felt experience of one's own past, tinged with the anticipation of one's own future. So the question becomes whether the dog has a subjective experience of his own memories in the way that we do—whether he thinks about the events of his life reflexively, as his events in his life.
Though usually skeptical and reserved in their pronouncements, scientists often implicitly act as though dogs have memories just like ours. Dogs have long been used as models for the study of the human brain. Some of what we know about the diminishing of memory with age comes from tests on the diminishment of the beagle's memory with age. Dogs have a short-term, "working" memory that is assumed to function just as the psychology primers teach that human memory works. Which is to say: At any moment, we are more likely to remember just those things that we bring a "spotlight" of attention to. Not everything that is happening will be remembered. Only those things that we repeat and rehearse for later recollection will get stored as longer-term memories. And if a lot is happening at once, we're bound to remember only some of it—the first and last things sticking best. The dog's memory works the same way.
There is a limitation to