Le Jetee No 253 (21 May 2021)

ANIMALS WHO ARE PROBABLY SMARTER THAN YOU
Brandon Specktor
RATS SOLVE PUZZLES
You might not think of rats as the smartest
animals, since humans are continually
using them for experiments. But did
you consider that the reason we use
them is because they’re smart, and can
handle the puzzles we throw at them?
They can memorize routes (hence, the
mazes), even though their eyesight is far,
far less acute than ours is. And their
problem-solving skills are on par with
those of dogs, despite their brains being
much smaller. Equally impressive, a Harvard
Business Review study found that
“even though the rat brain is smaller and
less complex than the human brain, research
has shown that the two are remarkably
similar in structure and function.”
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