There is also this awesome talk by Suzana Herculano-Houzel (mentioned in the article)

http://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_...

I am a little disappointed to find no comparison to the dolphin brain in the talk about the number of neurons! Why elephant? If it was about the size it could have been the animal with the largest brain out there (which happens to be a cetacean, like dolphins)!

Yup! And the article incorrectly states that humans have more cortical neurons than any other animal. Pilot whales (a misnomer, they're dolphins) have more cortical neurons than humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

Which is especially important because the article takes as given that the number of cortical neurons is what makes humans special.

wikipedia doesn't always have all the answers: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151110-evolution-of-big-bra...

The comparison to elephants was made to illustrate the fact that number of neurons isn't closely correlated with brain size. Seemed like a reasonable point of comparison to me.

My wife often observes that I lack a supersize brain.

I like this quote: A few years later, the anthropologist Richard Wrangham built on this idea, arguing that the invention of cooking was crucial to human brain evolution. Soft, cooked foods are much easier to digest than tough raw ones, yielding more calories for less gastrointestinal work.

So along that line, the massive recent increase in high-sugar food/drinks and fast-food restaurants like McDonald's should be fueling another leap in brain size!

Planet of the Apes here we come. We should have a second uplifted species of ape by mid century.