The Paradox of the Elephant Brain
mitp.nautil.us
mitp.nautil.us
(Excuse me for the sarcasm.)
How come that primates like humans, are much smarter than the rest of the world?
Even if you have trainable brain, with neurons that can communicate with more percentage of the brain than a primates. You're still on a diet of hundreds of calories instead of thousands.
Looking at smaller animals cognitive abilities is newish. But does look like it will be going interesting places.
A few links:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121001151953.h...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982205...
"The superior cognitive capabilities of the human brain over the elephant brain can simply—and only—be attributed to the remarkably large number of neurons in its cerebral cortex."
which simply does not follow. Well, that and we cook!
Instead, the author presents the first ever counting of the cells in the different parts of the elephant brain using a new method, different from the previous attempts, which results in the different numbers for the different sections of the brain. The new result shows that the elephant brain has indeed more cells than the human one, but that the distribution is different.
To those who don't know: cerebellum is the part of the brain at the back of the skull in vertebrates, in humans it's in the lower area of the brain.
http://brainmadesimple.com/cerebellum.html
Look at the brains compared:
http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic5/Images/IC5_page13.gif
The Cerebral Cortex of the elephant looks bigger, but, according to the author, has 5.6 billion neurons, compared to the 16 billion neurons in human's:
http://brainmadesimple.com/cortex-and-lobes-of-the-brain.htm...
This is new, as the estimates of the count of the cells of in the different parts of the brain of elephant varied before.
See nickledave's post for the link to the scientific work about the the method.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4380666/
"Subsequent work using computer simulations, however, revealed that a considerably larger number of cells should be counted (e.g. 700–1,000, Schmitz and Hof, 2000). It is possible that too small of a sample size may explain some of the discrepant results seen in stereology studies."
Of course there's chance that her approach will confirm the current estimates for dolphins, and then the simple count of the neurons in the neocortex will be too simple explanation to be valid.
In computer terms, it's easy to show: the transistor count of the CPU is not the only count that can predict the suitability of CPU for some specific tasks. Her research showed that the brains of elephants do have bigger total count of the neurons, compared to the total count of the neurons of human brains.
Another aspect - consciousness is not created by the brain - it is a result of the brain being in the world (in other words the "agent" being exposed to experiences). To reduce consciousness to a function of the brain is to overlook a force that is guiding, teaching and limiting the conscious activity. I think consciousness, as a concept, is more related to reinforcement learning than the brain.
What if elephant brains actually do outperform ours but along an axis we're not seeing because... well... it's something we suck so bad at that we can't see it in another being.
A relevant story:
I've seen people with insanely great social abilities. I had a friend once who could walk into a room and tell me the personal situations of everyone and we checked this once by starting a few conversations. She had a near-perfect hit rate at spotting things like people who had recently broken up, people who were unemployed, etc. It was spooky.
I'm nowhere near this good and might be "on the spectrum," though it's also possible that my preference for technical and intellectual stuff from a very early age just wired my brain for them. My brain only has so many neurons so I assume there must be a trade-off in what we dedicate them to. The woman in my story above came from a weird kind of complex abusive family and extended social situation (can't go into it and would be too long), so for her she might have dedicated a ton of mental resources to understanding social environments as a matter of personal safety as a child.
I was much more "spectrum"-y when I was a kid and a teenager. For the first 18 years of my life I was kind of oblivious to deep social cues. My social awareness improved really dramatically in my 18-25 years, and it felt very much like being color blind and then gradually acquiring the ability to see color. I became aware of cognitive abilities and aspects of existence that were all around me for the first 18 years of my life but that did not "exist" for me.
As I acquired these abilities I started to spot them and have respect for them in others. Prior to this I didn't notice any variation in other peoples' social abilities because I couldn't notice variation in an ability I didn't have and couldn't perceive.
Neurons are demanding cells. They eat a lot of glucose and need a lot of fats, oils, and micronutrients for their formation and maintenance. It doesn't make evolutionary sense that elephants would maintain a bunch of neurons that do nothing to boost their fitness. Brains aren't externally visible like antlers, tusks, etc. and so serve no intrinsic display or offense/defense function.
It could be an evolutionary accident of hypertrophy. Evolution is not such a greedy optimizer that this is impossible. But the high cost of brains is certainly suggestive of evolutionary benefit.
Edit: I've brought up these kinds of ideas in other contexts and I've found that they bother some people. People almost get defensive, like it's a personal affront to suggest that there might be alien cognitive abilities. I feel that if we ever do meet actual ET aliens we are going to get some kind of massive reality check. The obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/638/
I'd suggest that piloting these factors (reducing risk, advancing social relationships, developing the behaviour of their young) requires a wide variety of exacting performance in a complex environment.
"The cerebellum receives information from the sensory systems, the spinal cord, and other parts of the brain and then regulates motor movements. The cerebellum coordinates voluntary movements such as posture, balance, coordination, and speech, resulting in smooth and balanced muscular activity."
Huge body = huge cerebellum
Are we sure our cognitive capabilities are superior? How do we know we've been doing meaningful experiments?
Just think of the human hand or the mimicry we can express and how many muscles and associated sensoric feeds our brain continuously. Mass is relevant, but up to a certain degree.
I mean, yes you got hands and fingers, but they work because they have nerves in them and those are basically extensions of the brain.
> "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."
;)
Interesting that intelligence bootstraps like this. Get smart enough to use fire and that allows you to grow more neurons and get smart enough to make... wheels? Computers? What's the next leap after fire?
Next, you'd want cutting tools to separate your food into clothes parts and eating parts. Use bladders for storing water, which (along with clothes) allows for safer travel and bigger hunting/gathering ranges. Cutting tools also help make good weapons.
With a larger range and easier hunting, you won't have to be as nomadic to find food, so you can start permanent settlements. Find somewhere where plants will grow with regular flooding. Learn to make clay brick and pots in your fire, and you can now store food, seeds, and water. More time now to figure out how to control the flooding process so you lose less crops and can grow on drier land.
Maybe language? That surely changes our brain structure? Did that come before fire? We know that other animals have rudimentary language, so is language a precursor to fire? Is it a prerequisite for fire?
Sander van der Leeuw, of the University of Arizona / Santa Fe Institute, is among the researchers looking at this. Part of the process is tracked through the complexity of stone tools, which (he argues) is related to short-term working memory and the number of items that can be maintained there.
As to causality:
* Fire, cooking, and food preparation: increase food availability, decrease the uncertainty and energy required for food gathering.
* Tools, language, and simple structures: cooperative and complex arrangements. Possibly not so much the cause of mental development as a selection filter: those with better brains can work together in more complex societies.
* Agriculture, writing, cities: This pretty much sparked like a fire and took off immediately, throughout the Asian-African-European supercontinent, and, somewhat less spectacularly, in parts of the Americas.
* More recent developments may not have occurred over a sufficient period of time as to be profoundly evolutionary, though I wouldn't dismiss the thought. Still, the process is clearly cumulative.
You might also like to poke around at the History of Information website:
http://www.historyofinformation.com/
Also David Christian's "Big History" concept:
However, humans do have much larger brains than other primates, and those brains grow very fast immediately after birth. My theory is that after the advent of cooking, human brains were able to increase in size thanks to the increased dietary energy density of our new diet. Human breasts then had to increase in size in proportion with the nutritional requirements of those infant brains, which had to grow faster than previously.
My theory still works if initially, female pre-humans with larger milk glands were able to better feed their young and so had higher survival rates, while male pre-humans evolved to prefer larger milk glands. After a point, runaway sexual selection caused breast size to increase independently from the pressure on milk production.
That's the distorted popular version. The more common scientific version, AFAICT, is that they evolved in certain other upright primates to resemble swellings in the genital/buttock region of non-upright forbears and provide similar sexual signalling.
> Human breasts then had to increase in size in proportion with the nutritional requirements of those infant brains, which had to grow faster than previously.
This speculation would make sense if there was a relation between the quantity of fatty tissue which determines breast size and milk production. But, there isn't, so...
I would guess that the reason they're large and the reason they're permanent are related. One causal chain might be (permanent breasts -> males like breasts -> breasts grow), but others are possible. I suppose it might be that non-permanent breasts wouldn't be able to grow to the size they need to be, for whatever reason they need to be that size?
(In case it wasn't clear, I have no expertise in this area, and you shouldn't listen to what I have to say.)
One interesting possibility is that breast tissue influences maternal drive. A combination of neural activity and hormone secretion is possible and would do the trick nicely.
I think it's the other way around. We got bigger brains in the first place because our ancestors discovered fire and were able to eat cook foods that provide more calories. Therefore they progressively were able to sustain larger and larger brains. A gorilla for example has one of the largest brains for primate and they need to spend most of their days foraging in order to function. A human brain would be impossible to sustain without cooked foods.
( I swear I need of of those [0], my head - short hair nonetheless - is sweating like hell in the night )
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mediflow-1006-06-Original-Waterbase-P...
How do we explain the survival of people that eat only raw foods even today? Wouldn't that argue against your theory?
I suppose we're speaking about a population and that there will be individual exceptions. But even in a population, shouldn't raw food eaters die sooner or be worse off than cooked food eaters on average?
I'm not in favor or opposed to the person you're responding to. Just thinking about how humans eating a raw diet are different from other animals doing so.
"Survival," in the evolutionary sense, doesn't just mean "living into old age" but "reproducing successfully", which paused menses preclude.
As far as I know, that's not how evolution works. You don't get a feature just because you can sustain it. There's a random mutation and everybody who doesn't get it dies or fails to have offspring.
So in your theory, what was the mutation (or phenotype) and what was the environmental pressure that killed off the non-mutants? And how does it relate to using fire?
Sheepdogs and their ability to control a mob of sheep always seemed to me to be pretty damned smart...
Does the mass of neurons in the cerebellum give the ele' any greater capability? Longer memory for revenge, perhaps?