habits or preferences can be really important to making discoveries.
So he just happened to really like to play fetch with two tennis balls.
He wasn't happy if he only had one tennis ball.
He had to have two.
And that's really important because what happened and what I had observed as a kid
was if I threw one tennis ball, well he left one tennis ball behind to go find
the first tennis ball but then I would throw the second one while he was gone.
Of course, he didn't know where it was at that point.
And then, when he brought the first one back, he would look at me and
start to bark.
And what he wanted me to do was to gesture and point to where I'd thrown the ball.
Now many of you have dogs and you've seen this in your own dogs, so
this isn't a surprise to you.
But if you know where the research was,
before we started studying dogs on this topic,
this was a big surprise to scientists who thought that understanding gestures in
a flexible way was really unique and special about human development.
So my dog was using my gestures like many dogs do and I had remembered
that obviously and experienced that during my entire childhood.
And so I was having a conversation with my advisor, a great scientist,
Mike Tomasello, and he was one of the main proponents of the idea that maybe
animals can't think about the thoughts of others in any context whatsoever and
that really is totally unique to humans.
And I thought the evidence seemed pretty solid
except I said to him one day when he was explaining to me, just like I did to you,
about humans using gestures as they develop versus chimpanzees and bonobos.
I said well I think my dog can do that.
And he looked at me kind of funny and
he said, oh come on, your dog can't, everybody's dog does calculus.
And I said no, no, no, really.
And I told him the story about Oreo and he said, huh, well,
you seem really convinced.
And I said yeah, come on, I mean this is my dog, my best friend growing up,
I know what I'm talking about here.
[LAUGH] And he said okay, all right, all right.
So he was a great scientist, and this is where I learned what science is.
Science is not about having a lot of knowledge and knowing everything.
In fact, science is about being willing to test your ideas and
find out that you might be wrong.
And so, being a great scientist, he said, let's test it.
And he helped me come up with a way to test whether Oreo
was really using gestures the way that I was saying that he was.
And then it ended up we did a series of experiments to look at whether Oreo
used gestures like human children.
It ended up that my brother had a dog at the same time,
named Daisy, and she lived in the backyard with Oreo.
So we did our first set of studies on my two pet dogs in my parents'
garage at home in Atlanta.