https://www.canineneuropark.com/

Canine NeuroPark TM, Christchurch (2026)

19/09/2026

Roaming with Hounds Diary

Information is not in the sensory input!!

I see this statement often and I used to pontify this myself to clients, that sensing like sniffing, and watching, and tasting etc is information gathering.

The problem is- it is an incorrect statement and portrays a being, or specifically brain, to be these dormant things awaiting activation from the senses to learn.

First- information is in itself a word that explains what is unexplained. How the transaction between a brains output and input streams can construct such vivid and profound concious learning experiences.

What we do have is a lot of scientific evidence that information is the matching process between what the brain predicts the senaory outcomes to be from its own actions and behaviour, and the active sensory inputs / neuronal compression- IF, that is- the sensory input deviates from the predicted output / decompressing creates an error.

Furthermore, the brain does not have to integrate errors. Depending on believe & energy states, the brain can ignore errors and just go with its output, the predicted action plans.
We have a name for that ▶️ "Conformation Bias"

This may be hard to grasp at first, but once understood- it creates a wisdom of why it is so important not to just talk within in a group or echo chambers of similar thinking, but to discuss with other thinking beings, to avoid these biases and learn.

When we say things like: "I'm easily triggered", "my dog is very reactive", "there is trigger stacking";.... what we really express is, that we are not metabollically willing to plan and construct new experience.

To adapt is, to learn to gain new experiences now, that become memory traces that build more accurate expectations, actions and behaviours in the future.

14/09/2026

Roaming with Hounds Diary

Sensory Input Is Measuring output & optimizing

Sensory input is often still thought of as the “activators,” the “triggers” of cognitive processes between ancient and modern brain areas for “good,” “regulated,” or “bad,” “naughty” behavioural decisions/choices to proceed.
And it certainly is consciously experienced like that.
We experience to see something to then act:
You drive a car down the road behind another car. The front car’s brake lights illuminate, and you press your foot on the brake to stop your car.
That is NOT what occurs.
Actions like driving already incorporate the action patterns for braking. There is an anticipation to break. The break lights release the inhibition of the "breaking actions plan" while changing and inhibiting the "press gas pedal action plan", all before you even conciously experience the brake lights illuminating. The concious experience of the break lights going on when you already started pressing the break, are the optimizing parts of that "break action plan".

So, let’s be very clear — what are sensors?!

Even the origins of the word “sensor” itself — from the Latin sentire — reinforces the subjective experience of “perception” / “feeling.”

Claiming feelings and perception to be objective evidence for the measured natural changes is riddled with problems.
Let’s be a tad more constructive:
What are sensors:
They capture and convert/transduce changes in the environment that an organism is prepared for, such as:

• Photons reflecting off “things” / “objects” are captured by moving visual sensors — the eyes — which transduce light through photoreceptors.
• Air-pressure changes are captured by auditory receptors in the ears, and mechanical changes are detected through receptors associated with hair follicles and other mechanoreceptors.
• Chemical changes are captured by olfactory receptors (a type of chemoreceptor) in the nose and through gustatory receptors (also a type of chemoreceptor) and mechanoreceptors.
There are many receptors inside the body that afford physical actions and movement — and that deserves a post of its own.
Some you might know:
nociceptors, proprioceptors, thermoreceptors, down to intracellular receptors involved in gene expression, or cell-surface receptors such as ligand-gated ion channel receptors.
Simply put, all these sensors provide the opportunity for signal exchange.
And the word “exchange” is especially important here.
Because sensory inputs by themselves do not provide an exchange of signals — and therefore provide no meaning!

Signal exchange — communication — can only happen if there is a receiver/output: meaning, a receiver that expects a certain input.
Think of spoken language.
If you speak by yourself, there is no one (no receiver) to hear your words. There is therefore no message exchange, no communication.
For your words to be heard, transduced and made meaningful, you don’t just need another person. You need a person who can decipher your words (knows your language) and expects you to speak, therefore putting attentional expectations towards you speaking.
So what do sensors really do?
They measure changes against the brain’s expectations, providing information that can help optimise predictions of actions and movements in every instance of life.
Sensory input does not trigger cognitive processes, meaning-making or behaviour!
⚠️ It is, however, an important part of cognitive processes, meaning-making and behavioural output. ⚠️

Accompanying picture by chatgpt- note next to ear should also be a picture of the coat and whakers for mechanoreceptors

13/09/2026

Roaming with Hounds Diary

Neuropark is simply underrated for use of behaviour adaptation by many.

There is a difference of using Neuropark Facilities like a private dog park or as a safe & natural interactive environment for small experiencial changes that lead to natural adaptation.

The fact is, in animal training the hold of behaviorism is profound, with trainers tightly holding on to stimuli-respose methods. That is not surprising, because most scientific methods still use stimuli response observations to gather evidence on hypothesis.

While behaviours humans categorize as issues, especially in the dog-human relationships, are rising not falling. The obvious choice by many councils and polititians is to make new, limiting bylaws to keep the population safe and provide more options for control, fining and in worse case scenario, prosecution. Thats fair from the society point if view. But aren't they fail the dogs were say we want to help?!

It is enticing to believe that we can control a species via applications of positive (adding) or negative (subtracting) rewards and aversives as though it is an animal is a biological machine.
From this poin of view, natural adaptation is a fantasie.

However, natural adaptation happens every moment in our lifes. We are just mostly not aware of it.
Every moment your brain predicts the sensory outcome of its actions and all movements, and compares it with sensory inputs, and inputs deviate from predictions enough to force errors on every neuronal level and updates occure - that is the system adapting (learning).
Its not until these changes are on a timeframe where we conciously become aware, that we may understand how frequent adaptation (learning) occures.
You may feel your foot slightly slip and find yourself correcting the slipping with antagonist movements.
You go to the gym and work out hard and feel the burn- your system is actively adapting to become more efficient over time.

Interactions at a Neuropark Facility are no different. When we engage, those interactions afford learning possibilities on any level from chemical - electrical adaptations, to visceral, endocrine, motor changes to whole sequences of movements we call behaviours.

The only difference is- these adaptations happen on different timescales from 10s of milliseconds to seconds, to minutes, to days to months...

The one thing that Neuropark cannot offer is the part of long term memory consolidation.

That is why, what happens after a Neuropark interaction is as important as the visit!!

SLEEP that progresses through ALL SLEEP STAGES.

I was asked once why we have a registered trademark and a copyright behind the Neuropark name. Because what we offer might not be one method and integrates parts of today's used methods that are alined Predictive Coding Paradigms, but we worked hard to build the facility on solid scientific evidence of how a biological system adapts, learns and memorizes, not just to survive, but to thrive alongside you- the dog owner / guardian, parent (or whatever else dog owners call themselfs these days).

Beings have choices- to carry on as is and hope doing the same or similar things will eventually suddenly workout all issues or follow science.

Unfortunately I chose the latter.🤔😉💸

Video:
Observe the video from an active inference view and we can see small adaptations happening that become meaningful in efficiency and accuracy of all actions up to behaviours over time.

10/09/2026

Roaming with Hounds Diary

Choices infers Decision Making

Often I read about letting dogs make choices. Making choice infers descion making.
But we have a weired believe what choice and descion making or "free will" in that matter is.

A choice, a decision is not always a conscious through process, quite frankly its an unconcious event with conciousness becoming a part of the event itself-
And it is certainly not a perception -> action / stimuli response event.

How can we infer that?

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett describes one of the strangest experiments in the history of neuroscience.
In the 1960s, British neuroscientist W. Grey Walter was studying the electrical activity associated with voluntary movement. Patients were asked to press a button whenever they wanted to advance a slide on a projector.
But Walter secretly disconnected the button.
Instead, he connected the projector to the patient's brain activity.
When the neural activity associated with preparing the movement reached a particular level, the projector advanced the slide automatically.
The astonishing part?
The person experienced the slide changing before they had consciously decided to press the button.
The brain appeared to be preparing an action—and the projector responded—before the person's conscious awareness caught up.
Dennett called it the “precognitive carousel.”
But perhaps the most interesting lesson isn't that “the unconscious brain starts decisions.”
That's too simple.
The experiment challenges something much deeper: the idea that conscious "I", the self, that is a little executive sitting inside the brain, perceicing first, then making a decision and commanding the body what to do.
Instead, behaviour emerges from ongoing neural dynamics—preparatory activity unfolding before the final action, with conscious awareness becoming part of the process rather than necessarily initiating it.

The brain isn't simply a stimulus-response machine waiting for the world to tell it what to do.
It is always active.
Readily predicting.
Actively preparing.
Generating possible trajectories for action.
The environment then becomes part of the loop.
Brain → prediction /preparation of action → (environment / new information →updated brain).

Perhaps consciousness is one of the brain's ways of making sense of a process that was already underway.
That raises a much more interesting question than “Do we or dog's (animals) have free will?”

What if the conscious “decision” is not the beginning of behaviour, but one moment within an unfolding behavioural cycle?

🐕 This is exactly the kind of question we should be asking, when observing and olanning behaviour adaptation in dogs—not as Descartian stimulus-response machines, but as active, predictive organisms continually preparing for what might happen next.

Viewing behaviour from this point of view, can make us more aware of what methods we use, how holistic approaches are more successful overall, and that "giving choice" is not about making good or bad decisions but about letting the dog freely explore.

[Based on W. Grey Walter's “precognitive carousel,” as described by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained.]

08/09/2026

Tracking/ Man Training Event. Will be held at Ashley River behind the Airfield in the forest from 10am until around 1pmish

6-10 team availability depending how many tracks each team books.

Great for new Greyhound and other new canine adopters and experts, to build on communication, cooperation and lead skills, learning also how tracks are laid, among just enjoying an adventure together with the hounds, that concentrates on their natural canine skills.

No previous experience needed.
We mix experienced and new to sport teams to learn from eachother.

RSVP to [email protected]

First in first served

07/09/2026

Roaming with Hounds Diary
Resource Guarding...

Yesterday I saw a post by a canine owner re their dogs behavioural change of seemingly resource guarding rest areas & humans at a specific time of day.
The comments were especially interesting... or some... well, disturbing.

Simply put, resource guarding is an animal defending a resource that has become important to its system IN RELATION to its physical and/or social system in specific contextual instances within the immediate environment. It is a survival strategy that at that instance is the most cost effective way to reduce uncertainty.

It really should not be explained with operants!!
Operants do not explain how systems are built and work. Operants predict the likelihood of interactional behaviour outputs.

If the organism would stay in a state of high environmental uncertainty, that would impose a massive metabolic and neural load; because the system has to prepare / anticipate for so many different behavioural output patterns to be ready for anything.

Controlling a resource is a survival strategy creating a more certain, predictable, contextual instance that minimizes "surprise" (free energy) with significantly lower cost.

A sudden onset of resource guarding or any form of "aggression" is rarely a new "behavioural option" the animal takes, but often a signal that the system’s ability, to predict the outcomes of its own actions in the environment, has been compromised by physical dysfunction. Protection becomes a prominent strategy.

Before applying behavioral interventions (updating priors, reducing human uncertainty), the animal, here dog, must be checked at least by a vet. Preferably though, a cooperative team of a vet or vet behaviorist, a registered animal physio and a certified dog behaviour practitioner / consultant working together with the dog and owner.

A holistic approach should include the body, sensors, proprioceptive and musculoskeletal system functions

Exteroceptive Sensors: Are the eyes, ears, or nose functioning correctly? A dog that cannot accurately perceive distance or threat (e.g., cataracts, hearing loss) may guard because their sensory input is now "noisy" and unpredictable, forcing them to cling to resources for certainty.

Proprioceptive & Musculoskeletal Systems: Pain or dysfunction in the limbs, spine, joints, soft tissue and other bodily areas alters the dog’s internal model of its own body and its ability to move safely and feel safe in relation to its environment, which includes other animals and humans.

I.e.: if a dog experiences pain when ask to move away from a resource (e.g., getting up from a bed), the cost of "leaving" becomes prohibitively high. The guarding behavior is then a physical necessity, not a choice, to regain some comfort and predictability.

Importantly!
If a dog suddenly begins guarding, a full veterinary check up is the first and non-negotiable step before any behaviour adaptation takes place, to rule out physical dysfunction: You cannot "train" away pain or sensory loss.

Evaluate the relational interactions between all beings in the immediate environment when the behaviour occurs:
Only once physical causes are ruled out or managed can we assume the guarding is driven by relational uncertainty and predictive priors, meaning memorized behaviour patterns, that the dog may have learnt to work, to "score" a resource efficiently.

Systemic Integrity: We must understand how the overall interactive network system (dog + human + environment) is built to detect the underlying causes of dysfunction.
Is the unpredictability in relation with the environment? This takes a bit of dedicated detective work.

Conclusion
Resource guarding is the path of least resistance for an organism trying to minimize uncertainty (free energy). But if the dog’s sensors are less efficient or dysfunctional, its body is in pain, the "uncertainty" is internal, not just external. We must stabilize the dog's physical system before we can hope to change behavioural interactions with professional guidance, not by taking social media or AI advice from unknown / uncertified sources.

03/09/2026

Featured News Article from Bono Land...

In the deep natives of the planet Neuropark lies the myth of a rare, mythical species...
The Spanicorn.

For millennia, the Spanicorn was simply a story of a mythical species, told through generations ...

Today, brave explorers had endured the path to Neuropark, breeched its gates and found the mythical animal...

The Spanicorn has been proven to exists.
Featured in figure 1 below the:

"Spanicornus canis unicorna"

03/09/2026

Roaming with Hounds Diary

🧠 Freezing isn’t necessarily Fear

We often see a dog freeze and immediately assume: “They’re scared.”
But freezing is better understood as an action that can serve different purposes in different contexts.
In his book "Anxious", Dr Joseph LeDoux describes freezing as one possible defensive response to threat — a state in which movement is suppressed when danger is detected. In this context, freezing can be highly adaptive: don’t move, don’t attract attention, don't be seen, assess the threat.

But the same behavioural pattern can occur in very different situations.

🐕 Threat:
Freezing may reduce detection by a predator or give the animal time to assess danger, as visual systems are predetermined to catch - process movement.

🦌 Predation:
Remaining motionless can itself be part of a predator's strategy — movement may reveal your location, not just by sight, but olfaction and audition

👀 Information gathering:
An animal may stop moving because movement itself generates sensory information. By becoming still, it can listen, look, smell and orient more precisely to what is happening around it, which is an 🌿 Exploratory phase:
Freezing can therefore be part of exploration.
Consummation, a pause allows the animals brain to tag important information to consolidate to long term memory later during sleep. A pause is also the start of the release of inhibition of seeking, meaning it restarts the exploratory phase.

Both "Exploritary (preparatory) and Consummatory phases are needed for learning / memory processes.

"An inside-out, predictive system"

The animal isn't simply reacting to a stimulus.
It is continuously generating predictions about “what sensory outcome to expect with this action?” and comparing those predictions with incoming sensory information.
Sometimes the best action isn't run or approach.
Sometimes it is:
STOP → SAMPLE → UPDATE → ACT

Freezing is therefore a context-dependent action, not a behaviour with one fixed meaning.
And this matters enormously for behaviour sciences and here modern dog training.

A dog that suddenly stops on a walk isn't necessarily emoting:
“I'm afraid.”
They seek more information
Or:
LEARN (error update) as omething doesn't fit my current prediction.

If we automatically label every freeze as fear, we risk becoming so bias that we are seeing the behaviour, but miss the context that gives it meaning.

The question isn't simply:
“Why is the dog freezing?”
It is:
“What is freezing doing for this dog, in this context, right now?”
That shift takes us from labelling behaviour → understanding action.

🧠🐕 Behaviour isn't just a response to the environment. It is part of how an organism actively explores, predicts and changes its relationship with the environment.

31/08/2026

Roaming with Hounds Diary

🧠🐕 Usung the past to reshape oneself or/and ones niche- that is Conceptual Combination & Niche Construction

A dog doesn’t experience the world as a collection of isolated stimuli through sensory integration. Similar to humans, animals like dogs continually combine the expected past (memory -> "when last in a similar situation these actions equaled those sensory outcomes") with the physical changes perturbing the sensory surfaces of its and within its body integrating them into categories lead to meaningful experiences.
Fundamentally, the brain is a prediction categorisation system—constructing concepts by combining past experience with current sensory input.

This brain activity is organised through dynamic patterns and rhythms, helping coordinate information across different timescales as an animal explores and acts.

For a dog, this loops look a bit like this:

Expecting: viuals, Smell, in this place with that person in that body state and my body state expects this action with this outcome-> motormovements / interactions-> experience confirms predictions or O experience confirms discrepancies (tag errors) -> update errors (learn) -> consolidate memories during sleep

The dog can use previous constructed meaning, changing its surrounding through action and movements and creating new experiences to learn from.
In this video Mev tried to move the animated dog to learn its no threat

This is niche construction: the dog is not simply adapting to its environment—it is continuously constructing and reshaping the environment it expects to inhabit.

🐕 The dog’s niche is built through the interaction of brain, body, behaviour and environment.
Understanding this will bring us much further in creating meaningful, lasting behavioural bonds, than simply trusting in operants that eventually fail.

31/08/2026

Hudge Shuffle mats!⬇️⬇️⬇️

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1D4KiWkRsi/

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