Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagBob Yirka

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Luxury perfume bottles at a fragrance scent presentation at the event at night

How Can a Woman Missing Her Olfactory Bulbs Still Smell?

The brain’s plasticity intrigues and puzzles researcher, and it also raises a larger issue

Even since neuroscientists started imaging the brain, they’ve been turning up cases where people are missing brain parts we would expect them to need in order to do something — but they are doing that very thing anyway. One example, written up in LiveScience in 2019, concerns women who are missing their olfactory bulbs (illustrated) but can still smell: Researchers have discovered a small group of people that seem to defy medical science: They can smell despite lacking “olfactory bulbs,” the region in the front of the brain that processes information about smells from the nose. It’s not clear how they are able to do this, but the findings suggest that the human brain may have a greater ability to Read More ›

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Peaceful old man looking at his hound and holding the paw of it. Tranquil man is sitting in wheelchair and wearing eyeglasses. Hound is sitting near the chair

1000 Dogs Tested on Standardized Dog IQ test. What Was Found?

There were no breed differences for short-term memory or logical reasoning but some differences in how much they needed to interact with humans when problem-solving

Assessing dog intelligence is one of those sensitive areas because of the difficulty in agreeing on what to measure. Experts tend to say that border collies are the smartest dog breed but the response they may get is, “My shih tzu understands me and I am a difficult person to understand!” Nonetheless, a Finnish research group decided to try their hand at administering a battery of standardized intelligence tests (smartDOG) to over 1000 dogs between 1 and 8 years old, of 13 different breeds, with a minimum of 40 dogs from each breed. Here’s what they were testing for: The battery involves measuring different cognitive traits, from spatial problem solving to logical reasoning, to impulse control and an ability to Read More ›