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.

Comments

Re:Social Complexity

[stealth_finger]

FYI, theweatherelectric is a Mozilla employee. Look at the comment history. You'll find two types of comments: firefox advocacy, and abuse directed towards people calling her out for being a Mozilla employee. This describes 100% of her contributions to ./

Umm that post was about hyenas, not foxes.

Re:They may have more cells...

[DNS-and-BIND]

The dogs that bark constantly are bored to tears because their owners neglect them. People get dogs because they see that cute puppy and feel warm inside. It's all about the feels. Then the puppy grows to a dog and it's just annoying to deal with. Stick it outside leashed up and feed it once in a while. The feelings the dog generates are mostly negative and people get angry at the dog for making them feel this way. Honestly people shouldn't be allowed to get a dog unless they pass an empathy test but that would infringe on people's FREEDUMBS so we can't do that and millions of dogs suffer needlessly before they finally get taken to the vet to be killed for being inconvenient.

Re:And that means?

[rmdingler]

Uh-oh!

Estimates of neuronal numbers -- the product of neuronal thickness times density -- were 13% higher in males than in females, with mean male-to-female ratios of 1.13 in both hemispheres. The data provide morphologic evidence of considerable cerebral cortical dimorphism with the demonstration of significantly higher neuronal densities and neuronal number estimates in males, though with similar mean cortical thickness, implying a reciprocal increase in neuropil/neuronal processes in the female cortex.