The Human Brain in Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-Up Primate Brain (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The Human Brain in Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-Up Primate Brain (2009)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

46 pointsgraderjs24 comments

So, basically, it's an ape brain. Figures. That's why we do so much ape brain shit, around the world. We don't need complex theories to explain why the world is, in some respects, a violent mess, we just need to look at how primates behave in the wild: do they live peaceful lives in the abundance of space they have in the forest? Nope. They divide up that space into little areas, form tribes, and then go attack and raid other areas and other groups: killing, maiming, raping, eating babies. All ape-brain shit. And we humans do basically the same thing, but we need "intelligence" and "sophisticated technology" to inform our "military strategies". But it's all ape brain shit. All the crime we have: ape brain shit. And even all the online warring, all the Twitter mobs, and MeToo movements, and fake left extremism and fake right extremism, all that stuff, forming little tribes, and going and attacking and raiding others. Dividing up the abundance of free space, but this time, ideological space, and going to attack and raid other ideological spaces, rather than just living in the peace and harmony that would be possible if it weren't for our human nature: ape brain shit. Just sublimated from "real violence" into ideological, emotional, reputational, verbal violence. But all those ideological warriors love to pretend they are so much better than all the rapists and murderers and war mongers and child molesters and all the other bad things on planet Earth. But they're all just doing the same thing, driven by the same bullshit force: ape brain shit. We don't need complex theories to explain the state of the world, it's just human nature. It's all just fucking human nature. What the fuck is wrong with the world? Ape brain shit. Human nature. That's it.

Well, we only just recently developed a technological society, in evolutionary terms. Therefore were at the lower bound of being able to do so, otherwise wed have done it sooner.

This is humbling thought.

That may be true, but it may also be true that systemic constraints (availability of arable land, climate, population density, the slow inter-generational process of plant and animal domestication that makes agriculture economical), held humanity back longer than would have been possible if millions of cavemen were appeared overnight in the Indus valley with modern wheat in hand.

I’d go a step further and ask if our online interactions are really simulating ape tribes. The social and emotional dynamics online do not really substitute for real human relationships. Though they do serve some emotional needs, our social circuitry is hacked in a way by technology. We are set up to engage in an ideological discourse that leads to conflict. Not all human tribes engage in war; there is an ecological condition that triggers this impulse. Our digital ecology is not designed to be aligned with our well-being, but instead aligned with the interests of a capitalist system. In general, substances can be marketed which hack the human system and addict them to habits counter to their own well-being —- for instance, narcotics. Technology can be made to work harmoniously with human social orders, but doing so requires a strong model of human behavior in societies.

I thought about it a lot, because I used to be a complete recluse, avoidant, loner.. growing up half a nerd I spent a lot of time living online. When I tried to go back to a more normal social life, I realized a few differences:

- online is way less intense, people assume disconnected chats, and transient random strangers coming on and off. face to face less so, if you speak to someone you don't quit all of a sudden for instance, you have to communicate more.

- physical proximity matters a lot, you don't let people you don't like close, safety reflex ? some form of subconscious emotional match ? still, if you let someone close to you in the real world it's a lot more impacting (IMO) than even the closest people you get online.

- I also feel that in real life you're naturally more social, you don't approach strangers like on a comment thread, trying to debate intense polemics out of the blue. It can happen in the street or at a bar, but most of the time people try to find nice stuff to bond around. digital makes some slightly egotistic part of us shine stronger.

It is an interesting psychological thing, online, no one is inhibited, your for yourself in your thoughts in a cozy place, so its easy to speak unfiltered.

What I found astonishing is starting playing VR ping pong against other players. Suddenly, youre no longer alone in a place, you see gestures of hand and head movement and know the other person sees yours. There is a sudden feel of presence, and the behaviour shifts. Everyone is friendly (even muted players make friendly gestures) and one can have good conversations. Really interesting and pleasant experience, which I can highly recommend, especially for the home office.

Interesting. I dismissed a lot of AR/VR due to the `simulacre` nature of it which felt really pale, fake (uncanny valley and all that) and even limited.

That said I can imagine how having a more real time feeling of someone else even virtually can suddenly change your feelings toward the moment.

isn't it 'life form shit' mostly ? territorialism is survival trick #2

Orcas are highly intelligent beings who do not seem to commonly engage, if at all, in territorial violence. They say "you eat that and I'll eat this".

that's a cool fact I didn't know but that one species with itself, I was more general, life is about finding your own needs in space, at one point you'll have to push someone else off a chair

Fair enough, but...I see plenty of deer making peaceful living in the wild. And giant herds and flocks of the same type sticking together. Plenty of animals live at peace without conflict, except for males in mating season. Especially without tribal conflict against their own species. The big ape brain seemed to be used disproportionately against peace...

That would be a very special difference if apes really were in their own class of aggressiveness.

We need less Chimp brain and more Bonobo brain. We’d all be having a better time.

Yes we all can do with more transactional sex.

Yeah, but they only looked at neurons. Compute ability comes three things: switching speed, memory and communication speed. You need all three. If you restrict one there comes a time where you can't speed up no matter how much you increase the other two.

I'm not sure what correspondence neuron count has to those, but two other things looks like they would have at least the impact of neuron count, and there are synapse and axon performance and arrangement. Synapses I guess correspond roughly to memory, and axon's are the wires. To give a feel for the importance of these, the final maturation of the human brain that happens at age 20..25, turns a teenage brain into a adult brain, is apparently re-wiring those axon's and synapses.

They don't measure either, probably because no one knows how. But that means their comparison is pretty limited.

Read it. Astonishing to not read what I would have expected: larger animals may have larger brains then smaller animals as an extra gram of brain has a smaller impact on e.g. the amount of energy to keep it working. (To clarify: suppose a powerlaw exists: to be equally 'smart' one needs a brain the weight of A*(mass)^B, with A and B constants, e.g. B being 0.3. The 'cost' of having that brain is then much smaller for a large animal, so it can grow a larger brain without the energy needed to keep it going being (percentage wise) larger then the smaller animal.)

And how about evolution: that really smart fish with twice the brainpower of the equally sized fish just vanished, as it did not compete energy wise with its competition.

Indeed, humans may be special in that babies are more and more just enough developed to be born, so that they just can be born through normal labour.

These two simple notions (perhaps not explained perfectly in a single comment) are absent from the article, and hence I felt something missing;-)

With C-Sections there’s a good chance that like bulldogs, human beings are freed to have as big a brain as possible, so maybe we’ll see an increase in brain sizes in the next thousand years for human beings.

Where a hundred years ago the mother an infant with a giant cranium would have just died, now the pregnancy can be viable.

For that to happen you'd also need the people with bigger brains(smarter?) to procreate more often than others. Not sure if thats going to happen..

> Indeed, humans may be special in that babies are more and more just enough developed to be born, so that they just can be born through normal labour.

I think a corollary of this is maybe the simplest (while still compelling) argument for the possibility of greater than human intelligence (be it alien, modified human, AI, etc).

For it to be true that greater than human intelligence is impossible, all of the following would have to be true:

1) after some point, bigger brains have diminishing returns wrt intelligence 2) the maximum beneficial brain size just happens to fit through a primate pelvis modified for an upright walking gate 3) the maximum beneficial brain size can be competitively powered by a hunter gatherer diet

To me, that seems like a very unlikely conjunction!

> 2) the maximum beneficial brain size just happens to fit through a primate pelvis modified for an upright walking gate

I'm not sure that's a given. Whales and dolphins, particularly orcas are counter examples.

Fascinating. I'm reminded of the bitter lesson* from AI, which is that the scale of computation is really the only thing that matters.

*http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

So maybe it’s not really about the hardware after all, but the software?

e.g. Linux vs Windows on the same computer.

Right! It is all about software, and that in turn is all about culture.

That should have been clear long ago but we keep looking for a more rigid mechanistic source of human exceptionalism. This review clears the air. Lovely!

You can also read my 1988 review: The Control of Neuron Number that is cited in Suzana Herculano—Houzel’s Frontiers paper. The older Annual Review is open access here:

http://www.nervenet.org/papers/NUMBER_REV_1988.html

And brain microevolution is definitely mosaic as shown by in a 2012 Nature Communications paper; https://pubmed.ncbi.nih.gov/23011133

My only tweak to this review would be to note that variation WITHIN species is actually close to 2-fold when sample size includes many individuals—100 or more. This is the case in quantitative studies of mice, and this is likely true for humans too.

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