Super Brains

As the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos face off Sunday in the Super Bowl, it will be a battle of wits between the teams’ two quarterbacks, Cam Newton and Peyton Manning. Brainpower is important for quarterbacks. First, they have to decide where to throw. For this, says Philip Sabes, of UC San Francisco, the brain needs to keep a complex mental map that continually updates the locations of the receivers and defenders, and—just as importantly—predicts where they will be when the football arrives. Then, to make a precise throw, the brain relies on another continually updated map that tracks the position of the thrower’s own body and arm in space.

But what about other—non-football playing—animals? How much brainpower do they have? Humans notoriously have big brains for playing football and doing other cool, important stuff. Dolphins have big brains, too. The prevailing notion is that species with large brains relative to their body size are more intelligent, but there’s been little evidence to support it. Now, a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirms the idea: carnivore species with larger brains relative to their body size are better at performing a novel problem-solving task.

The authors studied 140 animals (from 39 different mammalian carnivore species) in zoos across the U.S. and presented each with a novel problem-solving task. They observed polar bears, arctic foxes, tigers, river otters, wolves, spotted hyenas and some rare, exotic species such as binturongs, snow leopards and wolverines. Each animal was given 30 minutes to try to extract food from a closed metal box. To access the food, an animal had to slide a bolt latch, which would allow a door to open. The box was baited with the favorite food of the study animal, so red pandas received bamboo and snow leopards got steak. (You can see video of the problem-solving hungry animals here.)

The team found that species with larger brains relative to their body size were more successful than species with relatively smaller brains. “Overall, 35 percent of animals (49 individuals from 23 species) were successful in solving the problem. The bears were the most successful, solving the problem almost 70 percent of the time. Meerkats and mongooses were the least successful, with no individuals from their species solving the problem,” says study co-author Ben Dantzer, of the University of Michigan. (How would crows and ravens fare in a test like this?)

It leads a fan (or gambler) to wonder, if we had a lens into Newton’s and Manning’s brains, could we predict the Super Bowl winner just by brain size?