
Bigger brains are not always better - mpweiher
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-genius-of-pinheads-when-little-brains-rule/
======
tacon
Humans can also work fine with almost no brain tissue, as has been discovered
throughout history. The canonical article is from 1980, "Is Your Brain Really
Necessary?"[0]

"There's a young student at this university," says Lorber, "who has an IQ of
126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially
completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain." The student's
physician at the university noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than
normal head, and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest. "When we
did a brain scan on him," Lorber recalls, "we saw that instead of the normal
4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the
cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter
or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid."

[0] [http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-
Brain.pdf](http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf)

~~~
fjarlq
In 2007, John Hawks criticized[1] Lorber's claim.

[1]:
[http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/development/ten_pe...](http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/development/ten_percent_brain_myth_2007.html)

~~~
tacon
Thanks for that update. That article was in my weird stuff file, and I had no
idea the evidence presented was controversial.

~~~
sandworm101
There is another layer, and it is very political. "Studies" that show people
can be functional without brain matter are championed by certain pro-life
groups who want to describe "brain dead" people as potentially functional. It
came to a head during the Terri Schiavo fiasco. Her scans were horrific,
showing very little brain after her accident. People pointed to these studies
as evidence that such a scan did not preclude recovery to a normal life, that
she should be kept alive at all costs in hope of recovery. That's how these
things stay around. Someone finds them useful for completely non-scientific
arguments.

------
somerandomness
Sure absolute size doesn't matter. But what about number of neurons or neural
connections? I'd be curious what the actual studies say.

The article hinted at this: "African gray parrots, which can identify shapes
and even count, as well as corvids, which have an equivalent number of neurons
to some primates and, it is suggested, may even be self-aware."

Comparing brain size vs intelligence across species seems weird since neuron
size/density differs so much.

~~~
alextheparrot
Shout-out to my account namesake's species. If anyone hasn't watched African
grey parrots on YouTube, they are definitely in for a treat.

------
thelogos
It is not about how big the brain is. It is about the number of neurons,
latency, signal reliability and number of connections.

Voltage-gated ion channels are non-deterministic. Meaning they don't always
open (or not open) when they should. In order to stuff more neurons into the
same volume of space, you have to shrink them. The problem is, those ion-
channels become more and more unreliable as the size decreases. I would argue
that they're already too unreliable in many humans.

Second problem, as the size of the axon and myelin sheath decrease, signal
reliability and latency will suffer. Yes, the current can die out part-way to
its destination. As the brain is less globally connected due to the sheer lack
of space, poor signal reliability and increased latency, it will begin to
favor local connections over global ones. In other words, specialization and
usage of signal superhighways to compensate, just like a crowded city. The
problem with a crowded city is, even with great public transport, many people
never leave their neighborhoods.

So what to do about it? You can leave neurons the same size and make more room
instead of trying to shrink them.

First problem with this, difficulty of childbirth due to skull size. Second,
increased development time, it's already too long as it is. Third, latency and
signal reliability will still suffer due to increased distance. Fourth,
increased use of resource. You also need to support those neurons and that
support system will eat up more and more space.

If you try to blow up the size of the axon and myelin sheath to fix the
latency and reliability problems, it will eat up even more space. In other
words, less room for neurons and you're back to square one. Another problem
is, you need a bigger body to support that huge brain. More neurons will be
dedicated to processing touch instead of higher-level abstract thoughts.

One last thing you can try is, decrease body size, increase brain volume
slightly. The lower level of violence, abundance of food, modern healthcare
(c-section) and longer lifespan (more time to mature) in modern human
societies allow us to do this already. Dedicate more resource to higher levels
of the brain associated with abstract thoughts, planning, reasoning, etc.
Over-myelinate those areas to increase signal speed and reliability.

At the end of the day, there's not much more mother nature can do without deep
structural and material change. Reengineer the myelin materials to increase
their insulating property and decrease the size. Make the ion-channels more
reliable so you can shrink neurons even more, although you still have to worry
about quantum tunneling. Or better yet, do away with ions completely and
switch to photonic computing.

~~~
nicholas73
I wonder if there will be a human-computer brain interface so that we can
augment our cognitive powers.

~~~
scadge
There's already one, actually just appeared :)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink)

~~~
antisthenes
He asked if there was an interface, not a startup that claims to be developing
such an interface.

------
prestonpesek
I'd like to suggest a theory here, that a brain's primary function is to study
and occasionally override the information processing algorithms contained in
the "unconscious" DNA of the organism. Once the brain has discovered the
optimal solution through innovative overrides, the best behavioral solutions
are recorded and automated in the DNA as hard code, and no longer requires
either supervision or further revisions. At that point in the evolutionary
history of the species, it no longer needs to invest so much energy in
maintaining such a large a brain, now that what amounts to optimal "muscle
memory" in the DNA has been established through successful survival and
selection of repeating behavior patterns. So what may appear to us be highly
intelligent behavior, these functions are coming not from the brain, but from
what has been captured in the DNA. This is a theory from a novice, I am not a
scientist of any kind, but an entrepreneur. I don't have time or resources to
research the validity of this theory, but perhaps someone else does? Thank
you.

------
whatshisface
"Eberhard used these web-making mistakes as a proxy for cognitive capacity."

That line seems kind of suspect from my armchair. Web-making isn't a general
behavior, and could probably be assigned a certain optimal ammount of brain
space as sight and other tasks were compromised to make room in smaller
brains. How did the researchers deal with this?

~~~
cgriswald
I agree. When I got to that part of the article, it just seemed to me he was
expecting the same CPU to perform better at a specific, more-or-less optimized
task just because it was larger, regardless of architecture or the amount of
components within the CPU.

~~~
mcherm
And yet we do that!

How fast is that CPU? You'll hear people quoting clock speed. You'll hear
people quoting FPOS (floating point operations per second -- at least we USED
to quote that). Both of which are single tasks.

It's not that we don't realize that the performance of a CPU varies depending
on lots of things like instruction set design and (especially) memory
pipelines and caching. It's just that there is not a general "does the stuff
you want quickly" benchmark to measure (or rather, there ARE several such
benchmarks, but each is skewed in its own way and not subtly, so that things
like clock speed and FPOS are at least flawed in OBVIOUS ways). And there is
some sort of very rough correlation: CPUs with greater clock speed do tend, as
a general rule, to run most applications faster.

I think rating the spider's intelligence by giving them a web-making challenge
was a really BRILLIANT idea, and provided a better assessment of intelligence
than any other test _I_ can imagine giving to a spider. Can you do better?

~~~
cgriswald
I wasn't questioning the methodology. I think this was a good experiment and
really interesting result.

I was questioning the shocking surprise at the result as expressed by the
article. A spider's brain is not a general purpose computing device. It has
specific evolved functions. Performing that function well is necessary for the
continuation of the species; both species have continued to survive, so both
species probably perform the function well; no surprise.

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et2o
There is a great statistic called the encephalization quotient that is simply
log brain mass divided by log body mass. There is a fairly strong correlation
([https://universe-review.ca/I10-83-brainmass.jpg](https://universe-
review.ca/I10-83-brainmass.jpg)), but you find that species which deviate from
the best fit line (biggest residuals) tend to be the species we associate as
intelligent or not intelligent. Humans have the largest magnitude residual.

~~~
pennaMan
What species is the point right next to humans? It's not a primate,
interestingly.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
It's probably a dolphin or porpoise. Not only do they have some of the highest
EQ of non-primates, they're also the right weight range:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cetacean_species#Famil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cetacean_species#Family_Delphinidae:_oceanic_dolphins)

You may think of bottlenose dolphins as representative of the whole family,
but they actually are much larger than most of their brethren.

------
soniido
Now that we have deep learning, we know that more layers don't always give
better results. Perhaps intelligence and wit is obtained when associations
allow our mind to develop neurons that are useful for modeling interesting
features. For example, being good at math and having good reasoning skills are
very useful features that can be acquired by education and practice. Also we
now know that our brain in much more plastic that what was previously
believed, for example taxi drivers brains have a bigger spatial area as a
result of learning to around big cities. So the question to get better
intelligence is how we make child brains develop neural systems related to
useful features?, unfortunately teaching chess is not a solution, but perhaps
is a step in the right direction, more research is needed.

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SubiculumCode
That complex behaviors can arise from simple processes is understood. Moreover
in the species mentioned in the article, the problem spaces relevant to
survival may have been relatively stable for untold amounts of time. The
stable problem spaces increase the evolutionary fitness of efficient
algorithms that solve that problem space with min energy expenditure. But such
efficiency usually has a cost: reduced flexibility to changes in the problem
space. I submit to you that behavioral flexibility in new environments may
well correlate with brain size, even excluding humans from the analysis.

------
scandox
I remember seeing a photograph of Quentin Tarantino shaking hands with his
producer and thinking: the craniums on these guys are enormous. It was the
first time I realized consciously that when I look at people with large
craniums I do automatically assume they are smarter.

Since I realized that, I reserve judgement until they start talking.

~~~
magic_beans
To be honest he looks more like he has some sort of pituitary disorder...

------
jondubois
I read an interesting article a while ago about a Russian scientist Dmitry
Belyayev who did an experiment to try to domesticate wild foxes through
selective breeding (by selecting the most docile specimens for reproduction)
and the foxs' heads (and presumably brain) shrunk as their became more
domesticated (source: [https://www.pelicanbooks.com/the-domesticated-
brain/preface](https://www.pelicanbooks.com/the-domesticated-brain/preface)).

I have a theory that it's the same with people - It would be interesting to do
studies. It's well documented that Neanderthals had larger heads/brains than
Cro-Magnons.

~~~
superioritycplx
Testosterone makes everything bigger.

------
6stringmerc
When I learned that humans have genetic mutations resulting in an additional
chromosome, my first reaction was to associate it with something like "X-Men"
and a big time advantage, and then finding out that it's pretty much an
undesirable development complication, I learned a lot about my assumptions +
imagination versus finding out the real story.

------
scotty79
> The best chip out of Intel can’t fly, ... , can’t dogfight,

It can [https://www.google.pl/amp/www.popsci.com/amp/ai-pilot-
beats-...](https://www.google.pl/amp/www.popsci.com/amp/ai-pilot-beats-air-
combat-expert-in-dogfight)

------
hectorperez
Neanderthals had bigger brains than us

~~~
mej10
This is orthogonal to the claim.

There are hypotheses that Neanderthals were actually smarter than our other
ancestors, and that they were wiped out for various reasons unrelated to
intelligence. They may have been less violent than homo sapiens or seriously
weakened by pathogens that didn't affect homo sapiens.

~~~
Mikeb85
Or simply less numerous. We do know that many of us (Europeans and Asians)
have some Neanderthal DNA, it's entirely possible they were just bred out of
existence.

~~~
temp246810
According to 21andMe, I am a whopping 3% neanderthal.

Don't know why I felt compelled to share this here, alas, there you go.

~~~
emmelaich
That's 23andme. I also have a high Neanderthal percentage.

Wikipedia says modern humans have somewhere between 1% and 4%.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Genome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Genome)

~~~
temp246810
Right on, something seemed off in the name but I just didn't look it up.
Should have known too, 23x2=56.

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akuma73
Whale brains are absolutely enormous but I don't see them doing quantum field
theory.

~~~
sharkweek
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more
intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York,
wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the
water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed
that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
- Douglas Adams

------
jlebrech
for example women have smaller but denser brains with closer neurons. so no
bigger isn't always better.

~~~
andrepd
IIRC the difference in volume is small (<10%) and no link has been found
between that and any measures of intelligence.

~~~
rlanday
Are you arguing that no gender gaps have been found in any measures of
intelligence, or only that none have been linked to brain volume?

There's a fairly persistent gender gap in average math ability:
[https://www.aei.org/publication/2016-sat-test-results-
confir...](https://www.aei.org/publication/2016-sat-test-results-confirm-
pattern-thats-persisted-for-45-years-high-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-
girls/)

I don't know if this has anything to do with average brain volume or not
though.

~~~
mikejmoffitt
The amount of potentially different experiences male and female adolescents
have had by the time they take the SAT make me believe SAT results are not
good references for this subject.

~~~
rlanday
How about kindergarten?

[https://qz.com/826748/the-math-gender-gap-between-girls-
and-...](https://qz.com/826748/the-math-gender-gap-between-girls-and-boys-
starts-in-kindergarten-and-is-largely-driven-by-teachers-biases/)

There are people who hear "gap X starts in kindergarten" and think "oh, well
it must be because of unequal access to preschool, lack of nutrition, etc,"
basically trying to look earlier and earlier for where the problem starts
until they end up trying to blame stuff like maternal nutrition during
pregnancy. Well, there may be factors like that at play, but if you start with
such a strong preconceived notion that everyone's brains are wired the same
way, no amount of evidence is going to convince you of the contrary.

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Arizhel
We'd be better off with much smaller brains, so that we can have smaller heads
optimized for an aquatic life. We're failing pretty miserably at this
civilization stuff anyway.

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known
I read somewhere that ants design better algorithms than humans;

~~~
Verdex_2
I would be interested in some sort of elaboration or source citing here. For
example what do you mean by "design". Ants aren't exactly encoding anything
into silicon or filling books with mathematics. Can you qualify what you're
trying to say?

~~~
sandworm101
Ants and bees are good at things like filling a space with a structured
construction, or growing a structure while using the least amount of material.
I wouldnt call it smarts, rather very-evolved patterns coded as instinct. The
ant, as a group or species, can do a few things better than humans.

