Why Adult Dog Can Lose Up to 25% Brain Mass

After only seven weeks of being alive, a puppy's brain and response patterns are  identical to that of an adult dog's brain. This statistic is recorded using an EEG. Because of this reading, it would be normal to think that a dog at this young age would be able to have the same ability to learn as an adult dog. However, this is not entirely true, irrespective of what the brain wave patterns show.

A puppy's brain may be fully developed, but their ability to learn and their coordination skills must be practiced repetitively over time, like any motor skill. It is similar to how people must learn a new skill. In fact, humans and canines are identical in lots of ways when it comes to how their intelligence develops over the years and throughout their life span.

After these years there is a slow and gradual decline of liquid intelligence. However, there is what is called rystallized intelligence that is based on what a person actually learns, that does not reach its peak in people until around their mid-40s. Some people actually maintain a slow increase in crystallized intelligence throughout their whole life. Canines are much the same way. Their brains experience  an identical pattern except for the fact that their lifespans are considerably shorter.

In people, developing intelligence increases at a speedy pace between infancy and in to the mid-adolescent years. And this usually peaks when a person has reached their latter teenage years. Brain measures have shown that there's small changes the ability to gain more intelligence, if any, between the age of 16 and 27.

Brain Changes In The Older Dog

One time a dog starts to reach his older years, there's noticeable changes in their physiology. When a dog reaches the age of or years elderly, the brain starts to lose weight at a massive rate of  5% for every year that goes by. For example, the brain of a healthy French Shepherd who is 12 years elderly may weigh  30% less than it did when this dog was years elderly.

Much of this decrease in brain mass is the result of brain cells that are shrinking and breaking down. And because neural connections become lost, knowledge travels at a slow pace within the dog's nervous system. This invariably causes delayed reactions and slow response time to noises and commands.