Does that mean dogs are smarter than cats?
They aren’t smarter than cats. They’re more social. Animals with a big frontal cortex tend to have much more complex social lives. There’s no memory in the frontal cortex. It’s just association, and it keeps track of different social relations. Memory is stored in the back two-thirds of the brain. Dogs have a more complex social life than cats. That doesn’t mean cats are not social [but] dogs are more flexible. With a small frontal cortex, when a cat gets really angry, it takes a long time to calm down. Dogs can turn it off quickly. Cats don’t work that way. You write that cats have a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. A weird thing happened with our Siamese cat when I was a kid. We had an old-fashioned dishwasher that pulled open like a big file drawer. The cat got under the dishwasher and got caught yowling and trying to go forward. All he had to do was back up and come out. He couldn’t do that. He just yowled and tried to go forward. I finally had to nudge the dishwasher until h
