After only seven weeks of being alive, a puppy's brain and response patterns are almost 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, regardless 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, just like any motor skill. It is very similar to how people must learn a new skill. In fact, humans and dogs are identical in many ways when it comes to how their intelligence develops over the years and throughout their life span.
In people, developing intelligence increases at a rapid pace between infancy and into the mid-adolescent years. And this typically peaks when a person has reached their latter teenage years. Brain measures have shown that there are very small changes the ability to gain more intelligence, if any, between the age of 16 and 27.
After these years there is a slow and gradual decline of fluid intelligence. However, there is what is called “crystallized 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 entire life. Dogs are much the same way. Their brains experience almost an identical pattern except for the fact that their lifespans are considerably shorter.
Brain Changes In The Older Dog
Once a dog starts to reach his older years, there are very noticeable changes in their physiology. When a dog reaches the age of four or five years old, the brain starts to lose weight at a large rate of almost 5% for every year that goes by. For example, the brain of a healthy German Shepherd who is 12 years old may weigh almost 30% less than it did when this dog was five years old.
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, information travels at a very slow pace within the dog's nervous system. This invariably causes delayed reactions and slow response time to noises and commands.
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