Tags
biomass, brain size, cerebral cortex, cerebral neurons, encephalization quotient, humans, intelligence, pilot whale, Suzana Herculano-Houzel
Humans are far and away the smartest animal on the planet. We’ve always known this, but we’s struggled with how to prove it.
We don’t have the largest brains. That would be the sperm whale.
Well, then maybe we have the largest brain/body size ratio, scientists must have thought. Wrong again! that honor seems to go to small ants.
Well then maybe we have the largest brain/brain expected for our body size ratio? Bingo! What most distinguishes the human brain from that of all other animals is that it’s 7.6 times larger than statistically expected for a mammal of our size and probably well over 8 times larger than for an animal of our size.
No other creature comes close.
Our huge encephalization quotient allowed humans to conquer the World, accumulating more biomass than any other species except for cattle whose body-mass we’ve deliberately grown as our food supply.
Of course there’s far more to intelligence than just brain size adjusted for body size, but when comparing vastly different species who differ enormously on this metric, it seems to be a strong indicator.
Enter Brazilian neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel who commenter Race Realist has been blathering on about for years. While she agrees that humans are the smartest animal on the planet, she felt she had a more direct way of measuring it than brain size adjusted for body size. Indeed, she felt we could just ignore body size completely, and simply count the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and she came up with a very innovative way of doing so: using detergent to dissolve brains into a homogeneous soup of cell nuclei.
At first this method looked promising. By simply counting the number of cerebral neurons and ignoring body size completely, it seemed Herculano-Houzel had found a simple brain property that ranked humans in first place. In 2017 she wrote:
the human cortex, with an average 16 billion neurons…, has almost three times as many neurons as the twice-larger elephant cerebral cortex, with not even six. The second-largest primate brain, the gorilla, has about nine billion. Even the largest whales don’t have more than three or four billion. Most mammals have less than one billion.
Thus, the human brain has by far the most neurons in the cerebral cortex – that part of the brain responsible for personality, temperament, pattern finding, logic reasoning and planning for the future, making behaviour more than simply reacting to stimuli. That, I believe, is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities.
Herculano-Houzel’s star began to rise. Seeing a Brazilian woman make such a monumental scientific discovery was inspiring. She gave a TED talk and commenter Race Realist began drinking the kool-aid (or should I say brain soup).
However a 2014 study found ” the long-finned pilot whale neocortex has approximately 37.2 × 109 neurons, which is almost twice as many as humans”.
Thus despite Herculano-Houzel’s Herculean efforts, encephalization quotient remains the single best neurological proxy for intelligence at the inter-species level, or at least the only one that puts us humans where we belong: at the top.
Pumpkin Person 
birds have more neurons per unit volume because why?
it’s obvious if you think about it.
the people’s republic of ‘gina now publishes more books than any other country according to wikipedia, but not on a per person basis. on a per person basis the list ending with the US is…
1 VaticanCity
2 Iceland
3 Luxembourg
4 Estonia
5 UnitedKingdom
6 Finland
7 Serbia
8 Singapore
9 Denmark
10 HongKong
11 Norway
12 CzechRepublic
13 Slovakia
14 Bulgaria
15 Switzerland
16 Belarus
17 SouthKorea
18 Belgium
19 Hungary
20 Taiwan
21 France
22 Germany
23 Australia
24 Japan
25 Cyprus
26 Monaco
27 Italy
28 Latvia
29 Netherlands
30 Spain
31 Israel
32 United States
so here the ‘gina people countries are well represented and estonia and finaland are high and some claim they are white ‘gina people wven though there’s no geentic evidence for this. in fact they are highest in cro-magnon % of any europeans.
and what’s the level of the books? for example, in japan adults read comic books called “manga”.
Manga>American comic books
“birds have more neurons per unit volume because why?”
Click to access 7255.full.pdf
What ultimate mechanisms drive the evolution of the enlarged, neuron-rich telencephalon, which sets parrots and songbirds apart from the more basal birds we examined, remains poorly understood. We suggest that this expansion has been due to simultaneous selective pressures on cognitive enhancement and an evolutionary constraint on brain size, which may stem from the constraints on body size imposed by active flight. Altriciality and the extended parental care that has developed in avian ancestors simultaneously relaxed constraints on the duration of ontogenesis, a precondition for telencephalic expansion by the mechanisms described above
Three things distinguish human intelligence.
1. We get enough food to eat that allows our brain to grow and function at a high rate.
2. Our hands allow the manipulation of our environment. Making brain functioning highly complex.
3. Imagination is the circulation of stored perceptions. We can see the past and the future with it. It allows us to come up with new ideas. It’s not exactly a miracle but it is the most distinctive human trait for creative mind expansion. No othe animal comes close. Imagination comes from a new organization of the human brain structure.
1) I object to the confusion between imagination and creativity. Some people without imagination are very creative (Pixar studio creator or Firefox engine creator) . Some people with extreme imagination are not creative at all (May demented schizo)
But I suspect there is a correlation between the 2.
2) you should also distinguis imagination (having images) and mind travelling. You know that obviously because you said you have no images but you are still able to travel with your mind thanks to other senses : audition, feelings, your lental’state At the time or projected. So it means you have memories’from the past and can create fiction for the future without imagination.
As i have neither, I tend to be biased against the idea that it is an essential part of the human brain. I remember Chris Langan in an interview saying memories building about day life experiences is just garbage collection and he thought people with high aptitude for that (episodic memory, but he didn’t use the term) couldn’t be very intelligent …
And Cooijmans sais that he doesn’t even believe peop’e have an imagination or mind travelling aptitudes 😂
“Thus despite Herculano-Houzel’s Herculean efforts, encephalization quotient remains the single best neurological proxy for intelligence at the inter-species level, or at least the only one that puts us humans where we belong: at the top.”
I don’t think EQ is actually in conflict with Houzel’s thesis. Humans have huge brains in comparison to mammals of equal body size, which is what EQ measures but within primates it’s exactly the size we expect. Which was Houzel’s argument.
Also, Cetaceans have lower neuronal packing density than primates do so this would support both Houzel and EQ. As Humans have a large amount of Neurons despite their body size. However, Cetaceans are known for their relatively large amount of glial modulators so maybe the benefit of NPD within primates is counteracted by this.
On the other hand, the axons of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and elephants have thin myelin sheaths and consequently relatively low conduction velocities [28,42,43]. Finally, the speed of synapse transmission is assumed to be constant among mammals and primates, but exact data are lacking.
Thus, in large-brained animals like cetaceans and elephants we find an unfavourable combination of high interneuronal distance plus low axonal conduction velocity, which strongly impairs neuronal IPC. In the human brain, by contrast, we find a reasonable interneuronal distance plus very high conduction velocity, and this alone may result in an IPC that is about five times higher compared to that found in cetaceans and elephants.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4685590/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22230634/
It may be overly reductive to try and find any one parameter to measure inter-species intelligence.
I don’t think EQ is actually in conflict with Houzel’s thesis. Humans have huge brains in comparison to mammals of equal body size, which is what EQ measures but within primates it’s exactly the size we expect. Which was Houzel’s argument.
Her argument was that we have the number of neurons we’d expect for a primate brain our size, not that we have the brain size we’d expect for a primate our size.
Ah, sorry. It’s been a while since I’ve actually read her papers. I believe Humans still have an EQ of 3 in comparison to other primates, which is interesting because it suggests selection for encephalization had less to do with caloric in take and resource allocation.
Still I agree, I don’t think Absolute neuron size is the best indicator. Long finned pilot whales may have more neurons in the neocortex but they also have larger body size, less NPD, and slower conduction velocity despite a higher presence of glial modulators.
it may be melo is chinese-filipino.
like wesley so, amy chua, …
of course so is obviously not full chinese.
but in general HBDers should expect that chinese filipinos are much more accomplished than filipino-filipinos.
AND much more likely to be immigrants to the US.
eugenio torre is a filipino grandmaster (and the first asian gm) who did lots of interviews with fischer. torre was apparently a filipino-filipino. hence the spanish name, perhaps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenio_Torre
My dad is way chinkier than me so I can believe it but idk. He claims his father was Spanish. But he has a high social intelligence which is coextensive with compulsive lying.
I’m Filipino and my IQ is probably higher than most white people.
Mortenson et al use stereological methods and not the isotropic fractionator.
How many sections of the cortex did Mortenson et al study? Stereological methods have a problem of undersampling; Nevermind the fact that it disagrees with Kazu et al’s cellular scaling rules (which, to my knowledge, not one of the scaling rules have shown to not follow).
Herculano-Houzel showed that human brain is the size you would expect a primate of our size to have.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009/full
So, it’s the fact that we have a primate brain (with tightly packed neuronal density) along with the absolute number of neurons in our cortex that (partly) explain human capabilities.
See also:
Click to access Overall-Brain-Size-and-Not-Encephalization-Quotient-Best-Predicts-Cognitive-Ability-across-Non-Human-Primates.pdf
Herculano-Houzel showed that human brain is the size you would expect a primate of our size to have
No she showed it has as many (cerebral) neurons as a primate brain our size. We have MUCH bigger brains than a primate our size & she’d admit that
right, my bad
Even if Mortenson et al (2014) used a less accurate method, they found pilot whales have 37 billion cerebral neurons, compared to the 16 billion Herculano-Houzel claims for humans. Unless their method is off by more than 20 billion, HH was wrong about humans having the most cerebral neurons.
It falls a foul of the prediction from Kazu et al (2014) on cetacean cerebellar neurons. They estimate 3 billion, using artiodactyls as a base since they are closely related and in the same order. They also criticize the same methods Mortensen et al use.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2014.00128/full
Looks like HH is a closet Rushton fan. LOL:
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/neuron-number-not-body-size-predicts-longevity-311288
They’re talking about cetaceans in general, not pilot whales specifically.
“Using the cortical volumes given in cm3 by Hofman (1985), which can be approximated to cortical mass in grams (gray + white matter combined), we predict the cerebral cortex of Phocoena phocoena, Tursiops truncatus, Grampus griseus, and Globicephala macrorhyncha, at 340, 815, 1,127, and 2,045 cm3, to be composed of 1.04, 1.75, 2.11, and 3.01 billion neurons, respectively.”
Your source looked at the short finned pilot whale ( Globicephala macrorhyncha) but not the long-finned one. But if the the short-finned one has only 3.01 billion, it’s hard to believe the long-finned one is 37 billion.
Maybe HH is right & maybe my source is wrong. But even if her metric is better than EQ, it’s not as practical because it can’t be applied to extinct species as easily as EQ can
Also, I expect EQ & cerebral neurons to be highly correlated since the whole point of adjusting for body size is to count only the amount of brain left over for higher thought (the cerebral cortex). HH simply measures that party directly & more precisely
I would bet a nice sum that Herculano-Houzel is right—her methods are impeccable, as far as I can tell.
Herculano-Houzel and Kaas have inferred nueronal count from extinct hominin skulls:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3064932/
See table 4 and figure 5.
here’s the list from US to pakistan.
33 Austria
34 Iran
35 Malta
36 Turkey
37 Romania
38 Portugal
39 Andorra
40 NewZealand
41 Russia
42 Greece
43 Argentina
44 Poland
45 Lebanon
46 Canada
47 Malaysia
48 Fiji
49 Sweden
50 Colombia
51 Ukraine
52 Indonesia
53 China
54 Chile
55 Eritrea
56 Brazil
57 CostaRica
58 Vietnam
59 Brunei
60 Thailand
61 SriLanka
62 Uruguay
63 Ecuador
64 Georgia
65 Albania
66 Armenia
67 Cuba
68 Peru
69 Panama
70 SouthAfrica
71 Algeria
72 Egypt
73 Mongolia
74 Afghanistan
75 Suriname
76 Qatar
77 Turkmenistan
78 SaudiArabia
79 DominicanRepublic
80 Botswana
81 Myanmar
82 Syria
83 India
84 Kazakhstan
85 Kyrgyzstan
86 Venezuela
87 Mauritius
88 Tunisia
89 Mexico
90 Paraguay
91 Azerbaijan
92 Guyana
93 Bolivia
94 Jordan
95 Nicaragua
96 Kuwait
97 Namibia
98 ElSalvador
99 Honduras
100 UnitedArabEmirates
101 Uzbekistan
102 Morocco
103 Bahrain
104 Guatemala
105 Palestine
106 Pakistan
answer:
birds have brains more dense in neurons for the same reason they have hollow bones. a brain more dense in neurons is not more dense in mass, and…
the secret…
birds can’t get off the ground with mammal sized brains.
the large brained bird would be flightless.
but chickens and turkeys and ostriches and emus and kiwis are dumb.
so theoretically evolution should select for smart over dumb and bigger brain over smaller brain ceteris paribus…
but in the case of birds all else is not equal…
flight is a ginormous advantage but no bird could fly with a human sized brain.
so density was selected for.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bird-brains-have-as-many-neurons-as-some-primates/
Awww he’s actually learning from me. You’re welcome mugabe
it’s hearsay, but my mom actually knew two parrots in brazil and she said they were as smart as dogs…despite having a brain 1/4 the size…
a dog is a “lemon brain”, a parrot isn’t even a “lime brain”.
that’s one yuge wound for my mom…she had to abandon those parrots because US said so.
so the fact that bigger people (europeans and men) have bigger brains need not mean that european men are the sexiest…
but they are.
the more porn i watch the more i appreciate the beauty of my junk yard.
In this day and age black men are considered the sexiest. At least controlling for intelligence and income.
No they’re not:
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5811840/amp
That’s not true. Unfortunately okcupid data is not good enough.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886910004617
In reference to my earlier position I’m speaking purely of anecdotal evidence. Blacks dominate sports and entertainment, so of course they’re coveted by white women.
I think the OKcupid data is more reliable because it reflects actual dating choices. By contrast asking white university students whether they think black faces are attractive is likely to yield more political correctness than honesty.
That’s not how political correctness works.
Being politically correct is being afraid to say “nigger”. Preferring black faces is a product of being in an era where you don’t have to be afraid of vocalizing your sexual preference without being lynched. College kids are more open because they aren’t ostracized for their beliefs. You need to understand this subtle difference otherwise you’re the same as dumb and dumber.
Okcupid as a sample is pure bias. Even tender is more popular.
Political correctness is more subtle than just eschewing the N word. It includes things like telling pollsters you disapprove of trump & then secretly voting for him. Social desirability bias is a real problem in research like this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias
Now I don’t deny that many white women are genuinely attracted to black guys,but I can’t just handwave away the okcupid study as easily as you can
Lol more people voted for Hillary the polls were not wrong. Trump just had more electoral votes. Gerrymandering is undemocratic.
Black men have an extremely unequal distribution. Your average black is unsuccessful and a borderline loser but some BBC people get lots and lots of women and become the third most successful category behind meds and nordics (Not the extremely White nordics though). Most polling data show blacks being close to Asians in performance. This is true for most blacks but the BBC crowd, worker class and dark stereotypes and media propaganda makes some get lots of women.
In Europe middle easterners perform very similarly to Asians and blacks in polling data. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271837870_Racial_Preferences_in_Online_Dating_across_European_Countries
Online dating does exaggerate the picture, and it overestimates east Asians greatly. Being black is like being 5’3 for most black people.
Unfortunately, TM, that may only be true in Europe. In America, young women, generally high school girls in certain regions of the country, go crazy for black men. And as they age, their attraction to black men only gets stronger. Blondes love black men and a lot of high school girls love black guys. And it isn’t the BBC, really, it’s any athletic-looking black guy, or just a black guy in general.
In terms of physical attractiveness, blacks might be voted a lot lower than other races because they’re not “attractive” if that makes sense. It’s their height, their physique, and a very low-cortisol attitude and personality that makes them desirable. If you seclude any of these things and don’t have the whole package, then you won’t be successful. But it’s almost like a triad of traits that make a black guy so appealing to white women.
Other races of girls do not find black guys attractive, though. Only white, black, and Latina.
The reason Blacks do so good in the dating market nowadays are because:
1. The BBC. Now this may not actually be true because the data on it is unreliable but it is a cultural rumor nonetheless and will make some white women curious. My ex only dated brown boys because she noticed we were better at sexing.
2. Blacks have less body fat and more muscle mass. Obviously chicks love a toned body. Blacks tend to be more athletic so they are more likely to have these body types
3. Hiphop culture has more or less made being black the “cool” thing. Couple that with the more confidant personality of blacks, It has white women swooning.
Now of course people like Chris Hemsworth embody a lot of this and don’t have to worry about competition of blacks, but unfortunately the cultural differences between the races creates this discrepancy. If a black man had none of the above traits I’d think he’d be considered uglier than any of his racial contemporaries.
Melo you are not black. Why do you keep associating yourself with that? Is it because youre IQ is also below 85? I just find it very strange how you talk as if you are in the hood.
I’m only black where it counts 😉
I grew up in the “hood” just old speaking habits resurface here and there. I was about that life so as far as I was concerned I am that nigga
Interesting that “Mug of pee” is arguing that chinese are inferior.
There are prenatal differences between these populations, but the amerindians, east asians and aboriginals over/underperform relative to blacks and whites. RR, what do you think about the environments potencially involved in this?
For philosopher and PP´s enjoyment, north american amerindians come from the coldest regions of america and have their infants act the least animalistically. So shouldnt they have higher IQ´s as well?
Thinking Mouse, I’ve noticed that certain societal structures cause people to act a fundamental way, meaning that people cluster around their race more than anything else. I mean, personally, I think genetics only gives certain insights about how a person will act, but predictions of traits using genetic calculations aren’t very influential in determining how a person will turn out.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s a spectrum within a race of how likely someone is to act a certain way based on their genetics, but that’s only within a race….between races, you can see that different populations from different parts of the globe will pretty much regress to the norm of their race.
A rather curious thing is how different populations in different geographic regions act so differently than their counterparts across the globe. Take the Vietnamese for example. In America, the Hmong people are known for gang violence. In Vietnam, I think they make a significant portion of the population and don’t necessarily have a higher rate of violent crime. Now this can be attributed to people having different environmental exposures, different lifestyles, etc. This plays a huge part in how people will behave. We’re all about adaptation as humans, so if your family conforms to a specific lifestyle, your life will conform to those behavioral choices as well.
Pumpkin, is digit span pretty similar to how auditory memory works in real life? Like, can you use the same strategies in real life as you do in digit span?
In real life you don’t have time for strategies because the information keeps coming non-stop. On a test they give you time to respond
Most of the studies I have seen on WM transfer shows a near transfer, it says near transfer means other working memory tasks? Does this mean an increased capacity for storage? But then, far transfer effects don’t exist- so, is it that storage capacity in and of itself does not affect fluid reasoning, or is it that storage capacity isn’t increasing?
This song goes so hard! Basically, Teejayx6 is a scammer, Dark Web master, and overall genius when it comes to conning people out of their money.
He’s probably smarter than Oprah, Obama, and the likes. True genius, not only artistically, but he can find anyway to make a play on you without you thinking twice.
MeLo or anyone who would be interested in his story should read up on it cuz it’s clearly the best story out there. Young black Detroit kid straight “juggin” and “finessin” the likes of Carmelo Anthony out of their money! Not a guy you should piss off, either…he’s got guns in the Dark Web.
P.S. Thinking Mouse lemme know what you think, I’ll post more songs like this if you find them to be worthy of passing your musical criteria.
*from the dark Web