Posted on Dec 22, 2022
Can dogs smell time? Just ask Donut the dog
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https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/22/ [login to see] /can-dogs-smell-time-just-ask-donut-the-dog
"The mystery dogged our family for decades. How could Donut tell time? And not just the approximate time, but the exact moment before the school bus would arrive. Every. Single. Day.
You see, Donut was my husband's dog growing up, from elementary school through high school.
"She was a stray that came to our house when I was about 4," my husband, Matt, says. She had big, brown floppy ears and giant white and black spots on her flanks. "She was a hound mix," Matt says. "We knew she was a hound because she liked to roam," he adds. "We had to be careful not to let her get out because she would roam the neighborhood."
"The mystery dogged our family for decades. How could Donut tell time? And not just the approximate time, but the exact moment before the school bus would arrive. Every. Single. Day.
You see, Donut was my husband's dog growing up, from elementary school through high school.
"She was a stray that came to our house when I was about 4," my husband, Matt, says. She had big, brown floppy ears and giant white and black spots on her flanks. "She was a hound mix," Matt says. "We knew she was a hound because she liked to roam," he adds. "We had to be careful not to let her get out because she would roam the neighborhood."
Can dogs smell time? Just ask Donut the dog
Posted from npr.orgPosted in these groups: 
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Dogs
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My dog can hear when the mail truck has stopped...I can't hear it. She also gets antsy with in 10 minutes before time to eat. She hasn't been able to understand daylight saving time though.
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PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."Hmm, somehow that human way of "sniffing time" doesn't seem quite as sophisticated as Donut calculating the arrival of the school bus, with minute precision.
That precision also enables dogs to follow scents through space when tracking down missing people, says cognitive scientist Lucia Lazarowski.
Perceiving without seeing: How light resets your internal clock
"Tracking and trailing dogs are probably using the intensity of odors, based on how old the odor is, to determine the direction of a track or a trail," she says. "So newer, more recent odors are going to be more intense and stronger than odors that have dissipated and are weaker over time."
So even when dogs are keeping track of physical space, they're also tracking time (or vice versa). And in a way, for dogs, time is inextricably woven into space. Which, if you think about, is reminiscent of the way physicists describe and think about time and space: that is, two inseparable ideas combined in one four-dimensional continuum.
Dogs are way smarter than we give them credit for. Who knew that while Matt was in school studying long division, Donut was showing off his mastery of astrophysics."
..."Hmm, somehow that human way of "sniffing time" doesn't seem quite as sophisticated as Donut calculating the arrival of the school bus, with minute precision.
That precision also enables dogs to follow scents through space when tracking down missing people, says cognitive scientist Lucia Lazarowski.
Perceiving without seeing: How light resets your internal clock
"Tracking and trailing dogs are probably using the intensity of odors, based on how old the odor is, to determine the direction of a track or a trail," she says. "So newer, more recent odors are going to be more intense and stronger than odors that have dissipated and are weaker over time."
So even when dogs are keeping track of physical space, they're also tracking time (or vice versa). And in a way, for dogs, time is inextricably woven into space. Which, if you think about, is reminiscent of the way physicists describe and think about time and space: that is, two inseparable ideas combined in one four-dimensional continuum.
Dogs are way smarter than we give them credit for. Who knew that while Matt was in school studying long division, Donut was showing off his mastery of astrophysics."
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