| ▲ | __s 4 days ago | |
Also amazing with birds is how effectively they've evolved intelligence with a small brain | ||
| ▲ | sitkack 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | |
We overfocus on brain volume, when we should be calculating the number of neurons and neuron size varies wildly. I can't find the original video, but Suzana Herculano-Houzel developed a technique to measure total neuron counts by liquefying the brain and then counting the cell nucleus density / volume. WSU Master Class: Big Brains, Small Brains with Suzana Herculano-Houzel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDM3TcfGoBY (nice short popsci intro) The woman who turns brains into soup: Suzana Herculano-Houzel https://youtu.be/d2Uhv0_Ji1k?t=362 (talks about racoon and bird brains) https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/09/07/brainiac-with-her-inn... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... This paper is really fun, "Brains matter, bodies maybe not: the case for examining neuron numbers irrespective of body size" https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Brains-matter%2C-bodie... | ||
| ▲ | pragma_x 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |
It's something to marvel at, really. Birds _needed_ to evolve super efficient brains due to all the constraints that flight puts on the organism; they have to be more efficient by weight as well as by size. Meanwhile, being earthbound like you or I lets our DNA get away with a lot more slop. | ||