Dog people tend to be pretty confident they know what’s going on with their animals.

When we put out a call on the Explain It to Me podcast for dog owners to tell us about their connection to their furry friends, the responses ranged from “soul dog” to “love of my life” to “I believe I can read my dog’s mind.”

But how well can we see inside a dog’s mind, really? That’s a question Alexandra Horowitz has been investigating for decades. She runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College in New York and has written four books on how dogs experience the world.

When we called her up for our episode, she told Explain It to Me guest host Noam Hassenfeld that understanding that experience starts with the nose.

“They are smelling animals. Smell is their primary sense,” Horowitz said. “My interest is in saying, ‘Okay, let’s try to understand the dog’s way of seeing the world through their nose, instead of just assuming that they’re just like us, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I’m sitting on a couch.’”

Horowitz talked to Noam about her experience with nose-first living, how dogs’ smell shapes their perception of time, and whether, after all these years of research, she feels any more confident she knows what’s going on with her fuzzy friends. Below is a transcript edited for length and clarity. But make sure to listen to the whole thing—it’s a great interview.

How do you start to take a dog’s point of view? You did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog? Or how should I put that?

Yeah, I tried to step into........

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