Early this month, a popular science magazine published research which claims that dogs are able to perceive both the tone of the human voice as well as the meanings of words that are said to them. The researchers believe that the human ability to form words, the basic blocks of language, emerged as a cerebral mechanism to support communication. Words are arbitrary sounds to which we allocate meanings. In spite of dogs not being able to articulate words, they seem to be able to comprehend a wide variety of terms: they sit, they go look for objects, they give their paw, and they wiggle their tail in response to specific words. In order to study how much dogs really understand, a team of experts from the University of Budapest gathered thirteen dogs of different breeds and trained them to stay still inside a magnetic resonance device for about seven minutes, at the same time they played recordings of their owners voices using various combinations of words and tones. Meanwhile, the scientists documented the animals’ cerebral activity.