Cats and dogs who are smart after research has shown that dogs have 530 million nerve cells in the cerebral cortex, while cats have only 250 million. There is still a considerable gap between the cortical cells of cats and dogs compared to the 16 billion nerve cells in the human brain, and the relative comparison between cats and dogs shows that dogs are smarter than cats. Experiments on cat and dog intelligence suggest this conclusion is based on a comparison of the number of nerve cells in the brain. The paper, published in the new issue of the Swiss journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, shows that researchers in the United States, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa analyzed the brains of a range of animals, including cats, dogs, ferrets, meerkats, lions, brown bears and raccoons. The absolute number of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex determines the richness of an animal’s internal mental state and its ability to anticipate what will happen in its environment based on previous experience, but it does not indicate that the bigger the head, the smarter it is for carnivores, said Suzanne Elkurano Uziel, associate professor of biological sciences, in a statement. Overall, dogs have the highest number of nerve cells in the brain of any of these animals.
