Are dogs smarter than cats?

Sorry, Garfield: Science says dogs are smarter than cats

Half of you will love this, and half of you will hate it: An international team of scientists says its research strongly suggests that dogs are smarter than cats. A paper accepted this week for publication in the journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy reports that dogs' brains have more than twice as many cortical neurons — the cells linked to thinking, planning and complex behavior — than cats' brains do. A pug dog at the annual Crufts dog show in Birmingham, England, in March 2011.

The team, working at universities and zoos around the world, counted the number of cortical neurons in eight carnivorans, a large class of mammals that have teeth and claws that allow them to eat other animals. (That's different from carnivores, the much larger class of all meat-eating animals, including humans and other primates.) They found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons, while cats have about 250 million. "I believe the absolute number of neurons an animal has, especially in the cerebral cortex, determines the richness of their internal mental state and their ability to predict what is about to happen in their environment based on past experience," said Suzana Herculano-Houzel, an associate professor of psychology and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, who developed the method the team used to count neurons. Read more...

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