Slashdot Mirror
Study Finds Dogs Are Brainier Than Cats (vanderbilt.edu)
Science_afficionado writes: Are you a cat lover? A dog lover? If so, you may be interested in the first scientific study to actually count the number of cortical neurons in the brains of a number of carnivores, including cats and dogs. Bottom line: Dogs have about twice as many of these "little grey cells" as cats. These "little gray cells" are associated with thinking, planning and complex behavior. The study found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons while cats have about 250 million. (For comparison, the human brain has 16 billion.) Another interesting discovery was that carnivores have about the same ratio of neurons to brain size as that of herbivores, "suggesting that there is just as much evolutionary pressure on the herbivores to develop the brain power to escape from predators as there is on carnivores to catch them," reports Vanderbilt University. "The study's findings also challenge the prevailing view that domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild cousins. The ratios of brain size to body weight of the domestic species they analyzed -- ferret, cat and dog -- did not scale in a significantly different manner from those of their wild relatives -- mongoose, raccoon, hyena, lion and brown bear."
The results of the study are described in a paper titled "Dogs have the most neurons, though not the largest brain: Trade-off between body mass and number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of large carnivoran species" accepted for publication in the open access journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.
The results of the study are described in a paper titled "Dogs have the most neurons, though not the largest brain: Trade-off between body mass and number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of large carnivoran species" accepted for publication in the open access journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.
I would be curious about breed specifics and percentage difference if any or other genetic factors as some are waaaay smarter than others.
Cat lovers, cower in the corner with tails between your legs.
Next battle to settle: vi vs emacs.
Social complexity seems to be a driver for intelligence. Hyena society is quite complex with clans and a dominance hierarchy within each clan. Hyenas seem to have theory of mind and seem to practice tactical deception. Hyenas are also good cooperative problem solvers, outperforming primates.
Our cat doesn't appear to be very bright but it's very lovable.
cats are smart enough to have staff, not a master.
...but cannot do their business on their own in a designated spot (cats can do that) and are inept to spend a few days alone (no problem with cats). I have come across many dumb dogs that bark constantly for no reason, but at least as many clever cats. More cells does not make one smarter.
Indeed. Dogs usually have a job or are constrained in many ways, while "stupid" cats are complete freeloaders :-)
Are they trying to start a race war?!
Cats and dogs are just different, k? -Stop judging!
We are only 30 times smarter than dogs!
My B.C was really smart. She was really easy to train and such a great friend, gentle with kids, even when they weren't so gentle.
The best thing about dogs is they teach you how to be a better person and live more in the moment just by throwing a ball. If your dog is too fat, you need to exercise.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Oh really?
You are ignoring that cats have more brain cells relative to body weight and therefore are actually still more intelligent than dogs.
It's my experience that hyperlink abusers are just a nudge away from a stay in a padded cell. They're like people who argue loudly by themselves in the subway; it's best to avoid interacting with them and quietly move away.
lucm, indeed.
These "little gray cells" are associated with thinking, planning and complex behavior. The study found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons while cats have about 250 million. (For comparison, the human brain has 16 billion.) Another interesting discovery was that carnivores have about the same ratio of neurons to brain size as that of herbivores, "suggesting that there is just as much evolutionary pressure on the herbivores to develop the brain power to escape from predators as there is on carnivores to catch them,"
Sounds like whoever wrote this was a)and not a cat person and b)a vegetarian
I'll go back to getting my science from Obligate Carnivore magazine where the science correspondent is a foul tempered tomcat with the nom de plume Rodent Gobbler.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Have lots of brains and don't know how to use it. Seriously.
Pah! Add them together and they're still not a patch on pigs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"The Human Advantage: How Our Brains Became Remarkable"
(MIT Press) Paperback
April 21, 2017
by Suzana Herculano-Houzel
https://www.amazon.com/Human-A...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
That is all.
For rescue, or military, or even bomb detection. They're a comfort pet. Outside of biological advantages of dogs for these tasks, cats are difficult to train in those tasks as they're solitary animals.
I don't read AC
I'd rather make friends with a loyal, intelligent person than one who is arrogant and only acts like they're smart.
You a flat earther, bro?
My dog runs 200 times to fetch a stick I throw, my cat gives me the 'fuck you' look the very first time and goes for a nap.
Definitive test...
1. Pretend to throw a ball
2. Which one runs over to where you pretended to throw it?
3. Which one looks at your hand where the ball still is, as if to say "Do you *think* I'm a dumbass?"?
That'll tell you who is smarter.
In particular, because neuron-count is not that important. Mu guess would be that cats just did not care to please the experimenter(s) and they are now retaliating by calling cats stupid...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It seems only humans lack the characteristics which minimize that problem.
Nothing wrong with either, but I prefer a veal.
if you think basic research is useless, you're the fool not the scientists.
And FFS this is a news for nerds website, so science is always on topic.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Each specie has evolved to be as smart as it needs to be, any further would be a waste of resources. Both cats and dogs may have evolved a little faster since they hitched a ride on human civilisation.
Cats rule, dogs drool.
Seems like a solid theory to me.
I find it strange that youâ(TM)re posting on /. when you donâ(TM)t find basic science useful nor interesting. Reading articles about scientific papers will almost always dumb down and miss the point of the original study. Neurology is one field where thereâ(TM)s a lot of research to be done, so studies like this actually have a lot of value (and the academic in me would argue that any study that expands human understanding of the world is worthwhile).
Journalists rarely understand the science they report on and even when they do, they have to frame the story in such a way that people will read it. Hence you get misleading and inaccurate headlines like, âoeDogs are smarter than cats.â Most people here, even when theyâ(TM)re pretending to argue in favor of their favorite pet, realize thatâ(TM)s not the point or conclusion of the actual study.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I find it odd that theyâ(TM)re comparing domestic pets to wild relatives. The truly dumb domestic animals are livestock and horses. That their wild relatives are equally dumb is what made them so easy to domesticate in the first place.
When comparing the domestic vs. the wild, intelligence is the wrong comparison. Social ability and paedomorphesis are where the true comparisons can be made.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Cats came to live with humans? Pff. Give me a break. Cats discovered knuckle dragging humans and made humans their slaves. Humans now feed cats, open the door for them, rub them, open the door for them, and feed them to curry favor with the higher life forms known as cats.
-Max the Cat
This all must explain why our dog is continually raiding the litter box. We have seven cats and a dog, and the dog is always grabbing 'snacks' that the cats leave behind for her.
I've seen her frighten herself by catching her foot on the boot tray in which her food bowl sits, scattering food everywhere and leaving her too disturbed to eat for an hour.
She's incapable of learning to fetch, where anything that isn't actively moving isn't worth chasing, let alone retrieving.
There are some dog IQ tests out there, and she failed every one: Example: Show the dog a treat, place the treat on the floor and cover with a plastic cup. She looked at it, sniffed all the way around, then looked up and whined.
Design for Use, not Construction!
There has to be some level of entertainment for the dog too: My previous dog would carry tennis balls to the top of the stairs in order to drop them and chase them. No owner reward at all. Current dog won't fetch anything, even for a reward. If it's not moving, it has no interest at all: she only wants the chase.
Design for Use, not Construction!
It really isn't.
They hold it easily for a work day, and understand "if you wanna go, you really gotta go now, we're going inside" (if given a code word).
They're even willing to learn to go in less than ideal settings (hard surface).
Try training a cat to only shit when you want it to, and within 15 minutes, on a hard surface.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Nothing in the findings denote what the article claims. The brain and thinking are more complex than just what amounts to 'bigger brain'!. Millennials are incapable of going beyond the surface, it's part of the reason tech is such a mess currently. Heaven help us when they are the only ones left. Break out the Brawndo. . .
I would prefer a neurons/gram or neurons/ounce because the Blue Whale probably has the most cortical neurons.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
One of my cats figured out how to close my netscape browser on my old iMac (Mac os 9 days) at age 2. He did it when I was ignoring him and he wanted attention. He could move the mouse and actually close it. I've never seen a dog do that.
I've never seen a cat leading a blind man or a Kitty Cop searching for drugs.
Traits which people generally confuse with intelligence.
And you may be confusing "instinct driven behavioral patterns" with smart and dumb in this case.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I had a border collie/black labrador mix. This was the smartest non-human animal I have ever known. He was also manipulative and sometimes an asshole.
For example, he would go to the door and signal when he needed to go outside to pee (no one taught him this). One day he wanted to lay on the couch but there was no room for him, so he went to the door and signaled. Someone got up from the couch and opened the door for him. He quickly ran and sat on the vacant spot on the couch. He then made a facial expression that seemed to communicate "ha ha dumbass I got your spot." We let him stay there.
He also understood the english language, not just command words but naturally spoken phrases. No one taught him that. He was a doggie Einstein.
FTFY. Also:
Cats evolved in such a way as to have solved the problem of keeping small rodents down. Dogs have not. In addition, as a single data point, cats have evolved to address the problem of being annoying to me, and likely others –whereas dogs annoy me because they are demanding, loud, drooly, and smelly. Most cats don't need to be "trained" to use a litter box. They just use them the first time you drop them in one, or just show them where it is. Not saying this makes them smarter (although it tends to look that way), but it sure as heck makes them less annoying than an animal that has to be taken for a walk or let out and in again.
Bottom line, we don't know how smart these animals are – either species – because we can't communicate with them in a way that gives us those answers. Counting neurons is disingenuous; there are people with smaller neuron counts that are obviously "smarter" than people with larger neuron counts. At some point it becomes an issue of plasticity and topology. There are neural networks that can outperform humans at various tasks; go, for instance. Are those networks smarter than people are? Think about that very carefully before you answer.
While you're at it, think about the number of, and relative complexity of, neural networks it requires to run a simpler, smaller body, with smaller, simpler organs, fewer nerve endings, etc. You want to be very careful if you're counting neurons and making sweeping generalizations about "cats" and "dogs" and "people."
Okay, mercy: here's the answer: We don't know. Because we can't measure how smart people are very well, we don't even know what it is. "IQ" is a very weak metric, for instance. All we can do is make assumptions based on performance. But that means we have to be able to evaluate performance as it relates to intelligence... and that's a very iffy road to assume you have mapped with an animal that can't (or won't, in the case of some humans) talk to you, and as far as anyone has been able to tell with felines, really doesn't care what you want anyway. If you want to train a cat, you need to figure out what it wants, and that doesn't appear to be a thing we've figured out very much at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In my experience (and I do not like dogs), certain breeds of dogs have the capacity to far exceed cats in terms of intelligence, but on average, I'd say the average cat is smarter than the average dog. There is also a huge range of intelligence across both cats and dogs. I think cats tend to innately exercise the full capacity of their intelligence a lot more than dogs. Dogs, often tend to be fairly lazy about using their problem solving skills unless they are trained to. I believe this is mostly due to domestic cats descending from solitary animals and needing to use their whits a lot more to survive.
Cat's are brilliant at being cats. Ya know?
Just like I tell my short kid; you are tall enough for your feet to reach the ground ...
and, on the other hand,
We have one statement about the absolute number of cortical neurons by species. We have one statement about the ratio of neurons to brain size. We have one statement that implies that brain size relates to body weight.
When we're talking about dogs, do we mean those little fit-in-the-purse dogs, or St. Bernards? Not only is the average dog a lot bigger than the average cat, the body size, the range in dog size is tremendous, while domestic cats have a much smaller variance.
We have a reasonably constant ratio of brain mass to body mass, and brain mass to total neurons. The average St. Bernard is maybe twenty times the body mass of an average housecat, and would therefore be expected to have twenty times the neurons. This needs explanation.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I don't think people love cats and dogs based on their intelligence.
I am not a neuro-scientist by any stretch but...I think I remember something about the number of synapses being very important. I understand that more neurones means more possibility of synapses but would it be possible for say... a cat to have 3 times the density than a dog would have with half as many neurones? Would that have an effect on intelligence? I'm a dog person my self (love cats too but allergic to them so I try to stay away). Just curiosity.
Both animals are predators. As animals, the only thing that really matters is success in their particular niche.
Exactly and because dogs have evolved to hunt in a pack while cats hunt alone dogs have to be brainier in order to coordinate their actions enough to be able to hunt effectively as a pack which requires communication and trust which in turn requires a high degree of intelligence. Depending on whom you believe some models of the evolution of human intelligence link it to the development of social skills and certainly there seems to be some correlation: elephants, dolphins, rats etc. are all regarded as highly intelligent and are social.
The ability to communicate and to grasp abstract concepts like anger, pain, hunger etc. is essential to both having large social groups and to intelligence. Cats are successful hunters not, primarily, because of their intelligence, but because of their natural weaponry, speed and agility. They don't rely on their intelligence to hunt as much as dogs - or indeed humans - do and so unsurprisingly they are not as intelligent because they do not need to be.
Show me any animal, of any species other than man, that can play chess or checkers
The parameters for which I would say that an animal can play chess are as follows: 1) recognition of all pieces, which includes both the ability to move any piece in a legal manner without being instructed on either what piece to move or where to move it to, and awareness of what constitutes an illegal move; 2) recognizing the turn-based structure of the game, and knowing when it appropriate to take a turn; 3) recognizing a win/loss condition as the end of that game, and; 4) ability to eventually generalize experiences learned from enough instances of (3) to play a stronger game in the long run.
Rats and mice display similar levels of practical intelligence, even though rats have bigger brains.
It turns out that good portion of those additional cells are spent managing the physiology from the expanded body payload.
Nto mongoose, raccoon, hyena, lion or brown bear
It's because I like cats AND dogs that the idea of someone slicing them up for "science" bothers me. No matter what the study says, it's an apples and oranges issue. Dogs are better at some things and cats others. Suppose it's a job for somebody.
I was able to train him to......come in less than half a day. I never saw anything quite like it.
My African Grey will call my dog to his cage, scold him and then laugh, the dog falls for it every time.
She has a large vocabulary can use tools and is pretty good at figuring out puzzles.
I had a border collie/black labrador mix. This was the smartest non-human animal I have ever known. He was also manipulative and sometimes an asshole.
My dog knew I was the alpha and that I didn't take any shit from dog. My friend's german shepard bit me one day and, since my mate was ok with it, I bit the dog back until it yelped - the look of surprise on the dogs face was - 'ok, I won't do that again' - from then on the dog was completely submissive.
I think dogs need to be put in their place so that they interact with people respectfully.
For example, he would go to the door and signal when he needed to go outside to pee (no one taught him this).
Yeah, my BC required very little training too. I even squared of a corner of yard and told it 'poo here' and it did, no poo anywhere else in the yard.
One day he wanted to lay on the couch but there was no room for him, so he went to the door and signaled. Someone got up from the couch and opened the door for him. He quickly ran and sat on the vacant spot on the couch. He then made a facial expression that seemed to communicate "ha ha dumbass I got your spot." We let him stay there.
I think you have to say 'get the fuck off my lounge' and make it clear in no uncertain terms that you are the alpha and you will not be fucked with. I never let my dog into the main house, laundry is as far as you come and you sleep outside (except when winter was really cold - then sleep in the laundry). Never ever ever is a dog allowed in the kitchen or where the humans chill, and never ever on in or anywhere near a human bed room, it's out of bounds for dogs.
He also understood the english language, not just command words but naturally spoken phrases. No one taught him that. He was a doggie Einstein.
Yeah, same. I would make up all sorts of dog games. Once I accidentally locked her in the garage (she was asleep) before dinner and she couldn't get out when I called her. Nothing more pathetic than going up to railway workers and saying have you seen a black and white collie about so big and the knowing look of how shit it is when your dog goes missing. Well when I opened up the garage door and there she was, in no uncertain terms, I got told off by my dog, the look, no bark but arrrrRRRRrrrRRRrrRRRRrrrRR and you better apologize for locking me in here, which I did and then gave her two dinners - after which she fell asleep and all was forgotten.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Cmon, you snowflakes have no viable argument against cats.
They climb fences into other peoples yards where they don't belong, which is complete irresponsible cat ownership. They kill native bird species, lizzards and anything else because that is their instinctive nature - to hunt.
The biggest problem with cats are the owners in complete denial about the cat's most basic instinct to hunt and kill and letting them roam freely. As opposed to dogs which are much easier to control, it is completely inappropriate for someone's cat to be outside a house because of how easily they can climb. Therefore it is a valid consideration to trap cats coming onto your property because the owners have no control over where the cat roams with their toxoplasmosis.
On the whole though, I do like domesticated cats, they are funny creatures. Generally cat owners do not take responsibility for controlling their pets, which is not the cat's fault, however it is the biggest problem with cats, irresponsible cat ownership.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
In general I agree that dogs must be kept in their place and be submissive to their owners.
I also have bitten pets before. A pet cat bit me once and I bit it back, the cat's facial expression was like "OMG WTF!"
But the particular dog I mentioned was an exception. He was special, and deserving of some privileges usually reserved for humans. He was more than a pet, he was a friend.
I'll bet that even small cats have more "grey matter" than Mr Trump!
Which, while tends to not be directly correlated to intelligence, does reduce the chances of any intelligence at all!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
... maybe but cat neurons are twice as smart.
There are. Unfortunately, this also contributes to making them near-intolerable companions: yappy, high-strung, and smelly.
Cats manage to be both pleasant to be around, and death on toast to rodents.
I'll stick with 'em. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.