Dog Brains vs Cat Brains

An interesting article from Cool News talks about the differences in dog brains vs cats and even rats. I think it may also be impacted by other senses such as sense of smell when it comes to locating food sources but the differences in the way the brain enable retention, even in animals, corroborates our brain synchrony findings.

The genius of dogs is in their relationship with humans, write Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, authors of The Genius of Dogs, in The Wall Street Journal. While other language-trained animals can "learn to respond to dozens of spoken signals associated with different objects," dogs are the only animals that have demonstrated an ability to learn the names of objects the same way humans do. A 2004 experiment by Juliane Kaminski of University of Portsmouth in Britain, involved a dog named Rico, who could infer the name of a new toy simply because the name was different from that of the toys he already knew, just like a human.

Dogs have only "half as many neurons in their cerebral cortex as cats," but apparently have better memories. "Several years ago, Sylvain Fiset of Canada's University of Moncton and colleagues reported experiments in which a dog or cat watched while a researcher hid a reward in one of four boxes. After a delay, they were allowed to search for a treat. Cats started guessing after only one minute. But even after four minutes, dogs hadn't forgotten where they saw the food." Okay, so maybe the cats are just too smart to be bothered with "playing our silly games."

Dogs are not as bright when it comes to "navigational memory." Rats -- not cats this time -- performed better at finding food through a maze. In a contest against wolves, dogs were not as adept at figuring out how to get at food "placed on the opposite side of a fence, as shown by a study by Harry and Martha Frank of the University of Michigan." However, a later study out of Hungary found that dogs solved the problem immediately after observing "a human rounding the fence first," suggesting that "the secret of the genius of dogs" is when they "join forces with us."

Our Brains Can't Chew Popcorn and Listen At The Same Time

One of the conclusions we reached in our brain synchrony work is that when different parts of the brain (sound, text, patterns, colors, movement, for example) are stimulated at the same time from the same stimuli, that helps us retain messages. So when scientists found that chewing while listening disrupts comprehension, we were not surprised. 

According to Bloomberg Businessweek (10/28/13) and as reported by Cool News, researchers at the University of Cologne conducted a test where half the subjects were given a sugar cube during the pre-movie commercials, while the other half was given popcorn. A week later, all of the subjects were exposed to images of the advertised products and the "sugar-cube moviegoers had a clear preference" for them "while the popcorn eaters didn’t. In other words, the ads hadn’t stuck with them

The result had nothing to do with popcorn, per se. The reason is that when people read or hear something, "the brain simulates the corresponding muscle movement of the throat and mouth … Chewing, however, disrupts the process by monopolizing the speech muscles (unlike eating a sugar cube, which dissolves on its own), effectively drowning out any subvocalization and, with it, the process of familiarization." 

An earlier study produced a similar result when subjects were chewing gum (or not). The research undermines conventional wisdom that "mere exposure" to an image or message "predisposes people to liking it." It also "has ramifications" beyond advertising, as "there are plenty of settings in which people are trying to absorb new information while eating – the working breakfast, the client dinner, the lunch consumed resentfully at one’s desk while trying to catch up on e-mail. Those might all be occasions in which we’re not taking in information as easily as calories."