brain

But they have quite different brains. The intelligence doesn’t seem to reside in the details of the mechanism Studying animals’ intelligence has taught us many things. But in some ways, it has deepened the mystery of intelligence. We might have thought that intelligence, in terms of individual learning ability, would gradually increase among animals, from invertebrates to vertebrates, from exothermic (cold-blooded) animals to endothermic (warm-blooded) animals, from reptiles to primates, culminating in man. In that case, intelligence would be associated with the increasingly complex brain structures that enable it. Research has demonstrated the opposite. “Crows Can Be as Smart as Apes” at Mind Matters See also: Even Lizards Can Be Smart If you catch them at the right time. But Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which have tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive: that is, a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Building on existing research on learning, Muthukrishna and colleagues analytically and computationally modeled the predictions of the cultural brain hypothesis and found that this theory not only explains these increases in brain size, but a variety of other relationships with group size, learning strategies, knowledge and life history. The theory relies on the idea that brains expand to store and manage more information. Brains expand in response Read More ›