Practice 12/27

Are you a cat person or a dog person? People around the world are bitterlydivided about which animal is the betterpet. But a new study may have found a clear winner when it comes to which animal is more intelligent: dogs. Researchers at Vanderbilt University in the U.S. state of Tennessee recently studied the brains of several meat-eatingmammals, including dogs, cats, lions, raccoons and bears. They found that dogs have many more neurons in the cerebral cortex than cats do. That area of the brain is connected to “thinking planning and complex behavior.” These are considered key to understanding an animal’s intelligence. Dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons; cats have about 250 million, the researchers found. Humans, for comparison, have 16 billion. 你是“猫奴”还是“狗奴”？ 哪种动物是最佳宠物，这一问题在全球存在严重分歧。 然而，关于哪种动物最聪明，一项新研究已经给出明确答复：狗。 最近，美国田纳西州范德堡大学的研究人员对狗、猫、狮子、浣熊和熊等食肉哺乳动物的大脑进行了研究。 他们发现，狗的大脑皮层的神经元数量比猫多。大脑皮层与“思考计划和复杂行为”有关。 该区域被认为是理解动物智力的关键。 研究人员发现，狗的大脑皮层约有5.3亿个神经元；而猫仅有2.5亿个。 作为参照，人类大脑皮层约有160亿个神经元。 Suzana Herculano-Houzel is aneuroscientist and a professor at Vanderbilt. She developed a way to measure the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex. She says the higher the number of neurons an animal has, the greater their ability to, in her words, “predict what is about to happen in their environment based on past experience.” The study’s findings mean that dogs may be able to do more complex things in their lives than cats can. 神经学家苏珊娜（Suzana Herculano-Houzel）是范德堡大学的教授。 她发明了一种测量大脑皮层神经元数量的方法。 她指出，动物的神经元数量越多，其触类旁通的能力越强，具体表现在“根据过往经验预测周遭环境的变化。” 该研究结果表明，与猫相比，狗可以在生活中做更加复杂的事情。 Herculano-Houzel worked with graduate students and professors from across the United States as well as Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Their research is to appear in the journal “Frontiers of Neuroanatomy.” The results of the study became a trending topic on social media Thursday. The researchers studied the brains of other animals, too. They found that bears had about as many neurons as cats -- despite having much bigger brains. And raccoons, despite their smaller brain size, had almost as many neurons in their cerebral cortex as dogs. And as for Herculano-Houzel herself, she is “100 percent” a dog person. ,,,苏珊娜与来自美国、巴西、沙特阿拉伯和南非的研究生和教授通力合作。他们将研究结果发布在《神经解剖学前沿》杂志上。 周四，这项研究结果成为社交媒体上的热门话题。 研究人员还分析了其他动物的大脑。他们发现，尽管熊的大脑体积更大，但是神经元数量却和猫相差无几。虽然浣熊的大脑体积偏小，但其大脑皮层神经元的数量却丝毫不逊于狗。 至于苏珊娜本人，她可是个十足的“狗控”呢。