David's Overview

Christopher is able to understand a dog’s emotions better than human emotions, and the University of Lincoln has recently discovered that dogs can understand basic human emotions. This unique predicament allows Christopher to create a bond with dogs. The University of Lincoln says, “For the first time, researchers have shown that dogs must form abstract mental representations of positive and negative emotional states, and are not simply displaying learned behaviours when responding to the expressions of people and other dogs”(Science Daily). Christopher is able to understand only the basic emotions of humans due to his disorder. Dogs are similar in that they can understand the basics of human emotions too. This is the reason that Christopher was able to for a bond with the dog, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, before it died because they were able to understand each other. With both of them at the same level of understanding emotions created empathy between them. The empathy is what really caused the formation of a bond between the two.