Brain Size≠Intelligence?

[Cabelaz]

Why are Sperm Whales dumb idiots when their brains are 5x bigger than ours?

Why do creatures with bigger brains lack critical thought?

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

It has more to do with the size of your brain in proportion to your body, not total volume.

 

[DrearyDoomguy]

It has more to do with the size of your brain in proportion to your body, not total volume.

Not even that. Neanderthal brains were slightly larger than modern human brains and they were on average slightly shorter than the average human. The relative size of certain parts of the brain can change quite a bit, i.e. the cognitive sections vs. those that governed things like sight.

 

[Bongocat]

Brain Size≠Intelligence?​

I don't think I've ever heard anyone seriously claim that it was?

 

[Vingle]

Albert Einstein was said to have a rather small brain. Bigger isn't always better.

 

[Kabuki Actor]

It has more to do with the size of your brain in proportion to your body, not total volume.

This can be observed with the actions of deathfats.

 

[Cold Root Beer]

It has nothing to do with brain size, it has to do with neural density. A killer whale's brain has less neurons than a human brain, despite the size.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

One of the largest skulls on record belonged to a mentally challenged dude iirc

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

One population of neurons interconnected by synapses to carry out a specific function when activated is not like the other. We need to stop seeing a brain as a solid uniform thinking device, it is hardly uniform. Precise evolutionary selections of precise regions of the brain formed our thinking piecemeal.

The most important two are the 'Frontoparietal network' which is a group of parts which lets you achieve greatness by problem solving so deeply that the house could be burning down around you and you were so singularly focused that you didn't care, and the 'Default mode network' which is a daydreaming group of parts that forgets the task in front of you letting you think about your kids, your wife, or what else is at home once you're done with the drudgery. You can tell a lot about a person based on which part you're dealing with when you present them with a novel task. Do your fucking whales have this? DO THEY?? NO, NO THEY DON'T. I think, I don't actually know whether they do or not. I'm sorry.

Other important evolutionarily-hacked together parts of the brain:

• ☚ Anterior cingulate cortex which gives us control of our attention from other things which could also be very important, arguing on the internet into the night probably uses this part so you don't do the right thing and head to bed instead. Think of it as meta decision-maker deep inside your own thoughts which chooses between either using your animal reasoning (of whether doing an action has helped you in the past) or using your human reasoning (of whether the decision-making in front of you is completely new and you have to put on your big-brain to figure out from scratch what to do). Essentially if remembered past-behavior is the best way to think this through or if you're entirely in new territory and you have to make deep intuitions about metallurgy or philosophy to figure it out. Its not the part that does the figuring out, its the part that either bothers the part that does the figuring out (the Prefrontal Cortex bits) or lets the grug-brain gut-feel it out like an animal.
• ☚ Caudate nucleus selects your behavior based on the changing values of goals and a knowledge of which actions lead to what outcomes. Damage here makes you unable to relearn how to behave when your behavior now only has negative outcomes when once they were a good idea. One study into this part of the brain presented rats with levers that triggered the release of a cinnamon flavored solution. After the rats learned to press the lever, the researchers changed the value of the outcome (the rats were taught to dislike the flavor either by being given too much of the flavor, or by making the rats ill after drinking the solution) and the effects were observed. Normal rats pressed the lever less frequently, while rats with damage in the caudate just kept at it.
• ☚ Thalamus, it allows your brain to not be refocused when you think what you think is more important to think then the other thoughts. Different to the Anterior cingulate cortex in that it is processing purely internal states and not actions. It will let you keep focusing in the middle of pain, but it isn't the part which continues an action while in pain.
• ☚Posterior parietal cortex, which activates in novice artists and not in experts to focus the mind on novel fine motor skills. If you learned to drive, it felt different to driving today because the first time you used this part to keep the numerous motor skills at the forefront of your attention. Afterward you motor-skilled your driving, which is like not noticing which legs you use when to walk across the room rather than hyper-concentrating on moving each part of each leg as you stumble idiotically across the room.
• GABA, Serotonin, and dopamine chemical messengers (I'm pretty sure most life which has a reasonably mammalian brain uses these identically, but Squid probably use them novelly or maybe other neurochemicals entirely?)
• Semantic Explicit memory (Not the recognition that I am drawing a 'B' on your arm, fear of the same loud animals the next day, riding a bike, or remembering your 10th birthday but recalling the state capital where you live. Also each of those types of memory are stored differently and in different areas actually making memory hundreds of separate things rather than the one thing)

Which of these if any do your precious whale brains have? Any? Look at this shit:

You got big dumb idiot brain, your human, your rapey-rape dolphin, and the river dolphin.

Notice that they have a missing piece at the front? That (among many other things) means they lack an DorsoLateral PreFrontal Cortex which is the part that is involved in both risky and moral decision making; when individuals have to make moral decisions like how to distribute limited resources, the DLPFC is activated. Imagine an experimenter hides an attractive toy under box "A" within the baby's reach. The baby searches for the toy, looks under box "A", and finds the toy. This activity is usually repeated several times (always with the researcher hiding the toy under box "A"). Then, in the critical trial, the experimenter moves the toy under box "B", also within easy reach of the baby. Babies of 10 months or younger typically make the perseveration error, meaning they look under box "A" even though they saw the researcher move the toy under box "B", and box "B" is just as easy to reach. The importance of DLPFC was strengthened by studies with adult macaques. Lesions that destroyed DLPFC disrupted the macaques’ performance of the A-not-B task, whereas lesions to other brain parts did not impair their performance on this task.

The sperm whale doesn't even have one. It knows what it knows but it can't readjust on the fly. We have our basic motor controls like pulling your hand from a fire, then we have our learned skills like riding a bike or working a machine (which an animal can do), but then, unique to humanity, we have the front bit. The front bit intuits. Which means it notices something the first time its shown, and adapts on-the-fly knowing how and why a change actually matters. So what does a sperm whale brain actually do well? Well, its mostly auditory/spatial processing. Atop the whale's skull is positioned a large complex of organs filled with a liquid mixture of fats and waxes called spermaceti. The purpose of this complex is to generate powerful and focused clicking sounds, which the sperm whale uses for echolocation and communication. Its mostly to hard-mode calculate how to make specific clicks and interpret the responses. Thats it. Big-ass brains just a sonar device. Sorry.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

What are you talking about? Yaniv has a big head, which grants him the supreme IQ to fuck with the entirety of Canada's court system.

 

[Question Mark]

Brain size is correlated with visuospatial IQ, but not verbal IQ.

 

[Spooky Doot Skelly]

Why are Sperm Whales dumb idiots when their brains are 5x bigger than ours?

Why do creatures with bigger brains lack critical thought?

It's brain size proportional to body. In humans brain size is correlated but not directly causal for intelligence. Human bodies, although varying in size, are close enough that brain size can be a decent proxy, but we have better tools available to us now

 

[MadStan]

Why do people post questions seeking answers that are found in books?

Why do people prefer to read a few sentences on a forum rather than a true long form explanation to increase their actual knowledge rather than trivial scant conversational knowledge?

Where does belly fluff really come from?