
The Paradox of the Elephant Brain - srikar
http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/the-paradox-of-the-elephant-brain
======
gumby
Sigh. Certainly the human brain is the most optimized (so far!) for being a
human and the elephant's the most optimized for being an elephant. Clearly you
need more neurons than a few to get higher functions, but above some (probably
tiny) threshold structure dominates. It's like deriving function and
performance by counting the number of transistors on a chip.

We see Apple's A9 is currently the peak performer ($/W, $/FLOPS) for a mobile
device with a big screen... but is still very very far away from Intel's
general purpose chips. Does that mean one is "better"? No, they just picked
different optimization points.

Far more interesting is why a chihuahua with a walnut-sized brain is just as
smart as an irish wolfhound that has a brain that masses about as much as a
whole chihuahua!

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
The human brain is better than the elephant brain. The fact that the elephant
faces extinction at the hands of human brains and is only being saved from
extinction by the work of other human brains is evidence at least at some
level.

~~~
premasagar
The elephant brain is better than the human brain. The fact that the elephant
faces extinction at the hands of human brains and is only being saved from
extinction by the work of other human brains is evidence at least at some
level.

~~~
andrewflnr
You could as easily say that snails' brains are better than human brains
because some humans try to save snails. It doesn't mean anything about the
snails or elephants, it just means the human brains don't all agree on this
one topic.

------
SilasX
It doesn't seem to talk about the plausible explanation that the _ratio_ (of
brain mass to body) also matters. So elephants have a bigger one but also
loses a lot of its processing power to a greater number of neural signals
(which probably increase linearly with weight).

According to this page, humans have the highest ratio except for a few species
that have very small brains in absolute size, which probably miss out on
benefits to scale.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-
body_mass_ratio#Compa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-
body_mass_ratio#Comparisons_between_groups)

I would also suggest that they're very disadvantaged in not having developed
the tools for more wide scale intergenerstional transmission of cultural
knowledge.

------
a3n
> With three times as many neurons, why doesn’t the elephant brain outperform
> ours?

Maybe it does. Maybe they're philosophers.

~~~
logicallee
Hard to be a philosopher while having to invent philosophy in your head
without hearing or speaking with anyone or reading anything. How good of a
mathematician can someone become if they have to invent mathematics on a
silent island with no books or even their parents teaching them to count?
Without language, this is the situation an elephant-philosopher is in...

I heard an interesting argument for what a chance occurrence language is in
humans: after all we talk by using the organs we chew with, fashioning our
lips and tongues into phonemes.

If the freak "language gene" were given to elephants (spliced into DNA etc) so
that they can develop phonemic values over generations using whatever
speechlike abilities their mouths do have, it would be interesting to note
whether they can develop philosophy then.

But man had modern brain and speech abilities for tens of thousands of years
before our cultural situation and heritage became interesting. You likely
wouldn't be impressed with the philosophical world view of members of an
isolated hunter-gatherer tribe tens of thousands of years ago who had no
writing. Interesting, surely, but as an curiosity. Would speaking elephants
left to their own devices be the same? Or do humans have higher cognitive
processes they cannot match, in addition to lacking our language skills? So
that they would not be put at a prototypical human level, but insteqd forever
stuck at the elephant level, their new language ability notwithstanding...

------
ejk314
I'd be interested to see how crows and dolphins fit in this ordering.

~~~
joeyo
Strictly speaking birds don't even have a cerebral cortex. That is, cortex
evolved in mammals after the split with the last common ancestor of mammals
and birds. So in that sense, birds would be at the very back of the ordering,
along with reptiles, fish and the other vertebrates that lack a cortex. That
said, birds do have a well developed pallium that seems to play a similar role
as cortex does in mammals, even though it is structurally quite different. If
you let pallium stand in for cortex, crows would probably do okay.

It seems likely that avian pallium performs similar computations as cortex,
despite having a different implementation. The more interesting question, in
my opinion, is not who has the most neurons of any particular type, but how
those cells enact computations. Does the avian pallium have _representations_
that are similar to mammalian cortex. In other words, does it solve problems
in similar ways/using similar algorithms as cortex or did its early divergence
allow it to find different solutions?

~~~
mc808
To me it seems our ability to preserve and share knowledge is far more
important for our intellectual pursuits than the individual brain is. E.g. it
took hundreds of thousands of years for someone to think up the number 0, and
then it spread like wildfire (after the authorities stopped resisting).

What I find curious is that parrots can vocalize at least as well as humans,
they show some pretty solid reasoning ability, their tongue is practically an
opposable thumb, and yet they don't seem to have developed complex spoken
language or technology.

I wonder what's missing from bird brains that would help them with language.
Actually, I just had a flash of memory about some part of the brain involved
with putting ideas into linear sequences, as we do with words. Maybe that
plays a part.

------
planck01
The elephant has a bigger brain, but it also has a much larger body it has to
monitor and control which takes brain power. The sperm whale has an even
bigger brain, and an even larger body.

It all comes down to the relative brainsize / bodysize. This wikipedia article
describes it:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient)
And as you can see in that article, our quotient is far the highest of all
animals. I find it weird that the authors of the article don't mention these
things and do not seem to be aware of this.

------
thaw13579
Another factor is that body mass is highly correlated to brain mass:

[https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/doc...](https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/images/imgs_sml_ver3/7_13.gif)

~~~
gweinberg
Except when it isn't. Dinosaurs had much smaller brains than humans, not just
relative to body mass but absolutely. A big body does not necessarily require
a proportionally large brain.

~~~
thaw13579
It's usually found when looking within mammals and is only a first
approximation at best, but it seems to be a useful one at least:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient)

------
eutectic
Related podcast:

[http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-157-dr-
herculan...](http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-157-dr-herculano-
houzel-on-what-made-the-human-brain-spec.html)

------
tim333
They seem to skip the obvious explanation of why we tend to be smarter than
Elephants is that our brains have in some ways a better design. It's not all
about how many kilos of neurones you have or cows would be discussing
metaphysics. Evolution works by random DNA mutations and quite likely we just
got lucky in hitting some good ones.

------
quadrangle
How disappointing. The thing I most wanted out of this article was to learn
what was so significant and powerful about the elephant cerebellum. Surely,
that means elephants have superior abilities in the aspects relevant to the
cerebellum. I want to hear about the amazing things elephants can do that this
enables.

~~~
Fjolsvith
They have a long nose that they can use to grab things, and they can even
spray water with that nose!

~~~
quadrangle
Their nose is amazing, of course. Is all the mass of their cerebellum
connected to using their noses??

------
crimsonalucard
Superiority is the wrong word. The author should say human like behavior is
correlated with a higher number of neurons in the cerebral cortex..
Additionally, I remember dolphins had more neurons in overall in their
cerebral cortex..

------
lttlrck
So what do elephants use all those neurons for?

------
lossolo
I wonder how much information brain can store, especially in context of people
with "photographic memory".

