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He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics and then received his MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. Mark bounced around the semiconductor industry in the Bay Area for a while but never meshed well with management. After he moved to Atlanta, he and his German shepherd, Topper, started competing in agility competitions to relieve some of his work stress. They did well, and Mark began helping friends with dog-training problems on the side. Within a few years, he decided to take the plunge and go into the dog-training business full-time.
    Mark was a no-nonsense kind of guy. He employed several schools of thought about dog training, choosing the methods most appropriate for each dog and owner. And while he favored positive training methods, he acknowledged that punishment was also necessary from time to time.
    Even though I hadn’t yet bonded emotionally with Callie, I did enjoy working with her in Mark’s obedience class. Lyra had takenthis class too, but she had never had the level of intensity that Callie brought to the table. Callie wasn’t warm and cuddly, but I had to respect her work ethic. She couldn’t get enough training. She would do anything for a bit of hot dog. I was amazed that she learned basic commands like “sit,” “stay,” and “come” in just a few tries. The CPT teachers loved to use Callie as an example, because she watched them intently and worked tirelessly for a treat.
    As Mark was the only dog trainer I knew, it made sense to approach him about the idea of training dogs to go into an MRI. He took an almost academic approach to dog training, so I hoped he would find the idea of scanning dogs’ brains interesting enough to do for fun.
    Much to my delight, Mark agreed to meet.
    The modern study of dog behavior began with every biologist’s hero, Charles Darwin. In
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal
, Darwin devoted a great deal of attention to the dog—as an owner himself, his study of dog behavior didn’t require a trip to the Galapagos Islands. What Darwin understood, and what every dog owner knows—but many research scientists seem to have forgotten—is that dogs have a rich set of expressions and body language. Darwin had no problem discerning joy, fear, and rage in dogs. He was primarily concerned with observing the expression of these emotions, not with the intent of training these intelligent animals, but rather to understand how human emotions evolved.
    It was the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov who launched the modern era of dog training. Unlike Darwin, Pavlov had no love for dogs himself. He was just using them to study the digestive system. The problem was that his dogs started salivating before he fed them, and this messed up his data. Regardless of what you think about Pavlov, his “failed” experiment led to the most important discovery in psychology of the twentieth century, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904. His discovery has completely dominated theories of dog training ever since.
    Pavlov’s discovery is called
classical conditioning
(although some people honor him by calling it
Pavlovian conditioning
). During the period in which Pavlov was doing his experiments, physiologists thought of the entire nervous system as a collection of reflexes, like the involuntary leg jerk when a doctor raps on your knee. They believed that all behaviors, even complex ones, were basically a series of reflexive actions. A reflex could be broken down into two parts: the unconditioned stimulus (US) and the unconditioned response (UR). For the knee reflex, the US is the hammer hitting the patellar tendon and the UR is the quadriceps contraction that results in the leg jerking upward. Pretty simple.
    Pavlov realized that his dogs were having reflexive responses, but they weren’t natural. Hungry dogs will always salivate when presented with food. This is a natural, and thus unconditioned, response. But, as