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published research falls into this arena.
    The thing is, hypothesis-driven experiments are incredibly dull. Most of the time you don’t even need to read the experiment to know that the scientists have proven what they basically knew in the first place. If you already have a well-accepted hypothesis, then you already know the most interesting aspects of the scientific question, and the experimental results will, at best, advance knowledge incrementally. Of course, if the hypothesis turns out to be wrong, that would be really interesting. But those results are almost impossible to publish because nobody believes them.
    In answer to Lisa’s question, I said, “This is a fishing expedition. It is an idea in search of a question.”
    Andrew frowned, clearly troubled by the conflict this would cause with his dissertation research. The standard curriculum of any graduate program in science drills into students the importance of having a clear hypothesis for their research. But I had no hypothesis for the Dog Project. I had no idea how we were going to do this or how long it would take. Frankly, it probably wouldn’t even work.
    “Andrew,” I said, “the Dog Project will be high risk. But it’s going to be a blast, and I guarantee you that if it works, we’ll be the first to have pulled it off.”
    “I’m in,” he said. “But are we going to have to sedate the dogs?”
    “Why would we do that? If they’re sedated, then we won’t know what they’re thinking.”
    “So they’ll be completely awake?” Lisa asked.
    “They’ll have to be,” I replied. “Just like humans.”
    At the time, none of us realized just how much work lay ahead. We didn’t know what the technical difficulties might be, considering dog brains are much smaller than human ones. We hadn’t even begun to think about the actual experiments we might attempt.
    At that point, it was all academic. Before we could go any further, we would have to figure out how to train a dog to go inside an MRI.

4
    Puppy Steps
    E VEN THOUGH CALLIE HAD BEEN in the house for a year, I had not completely warmed up to her.
    I wasn’t even sure that I liked her.
    Kat knew how much I had loved Newton. When she and the girls went to the animal shelter, they had deliberately picked a dog that was about as different from a pug as you could get. Callie was the anti-pug. Pugs are short, stocky, and slow. Callie was a lean, mean fighting machine. Her muscles rippled beneath her thin coat.
    Where Newton’s face had been fixed in a permanent clownlike expression, Callie’s was always on high alert. Her head was like a periscope, constantly swiveling back and forth in search of prey. Though she was quite friendly, her posture was off-putting to many of the dogs in the neighborhood.
    Callie’s strong drive caused endless distress to Helen and Maddy. Whenever Callie killed a chipmunk, the girls would berate her for her cruelty. To make matters worse, Callie wasn’t cuddly. She didn’t like to sit in laps. Sure, she would readily hop on the sofa, but then she would curl up like a cat at the other end—nearby, but not quite touching.
    I missed my bedtime ritual with Newton. He would burrow under the covers, seeking refuge in my armpit, and I would pretend to protest. Although Callie wanted to sleep in the bed, her state of alertness never switched off. She would assume a position at the foot of the bed, facing the door, on watch for potential intruders or edible critters. Any attempt to move her unleashed a snarling, snapping bundle of fur. She wanted nothing to do with my armpit.
    There was a dog-training facility in a strip mall within walking distance from our house. It was called Comprehensive Pet Therapy—CPT for short. Shortly after Kat adopted her, we signed Callie up for a basic obedience class.
    CPT was the brainchild of Mark Spivak, who founded it in 1992. I first met Mark when we signed Lyra up for obedience training in 2005. Mark was not your typical dog trainer.