Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans

Re:Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans by jazzyjackson on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @06:37AM (#31751140)

I know very little about brains in general but I would guess that the number of synapses (connections between nuerons) has more to do with intelligence than the number of neurons themselves. Could be that this scales exponentially. I think it's much easier to count neurons tho, seems like we have good numbers for lots of species.

Worth considering that African elephants have 3x the nuerons we do, Killer Whales twice as many only counting the cerebellum.

Cool list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans by samatman on Thursday June 16, 2022 @08:52AM (#31765472)

It's interesting right! But it turns out elephants have about a third of the cortical neurons as humans, presumably they need more brain capacity to handle being enormous.

Orca, on the other hand, have more cortical neurons than we do, and much larger brains in general. Part of that is clearly that they have an incredible sense we don't, the ability to make three-dimensional maps out of sound, but orca are also remarkably complex beings and I don't have too much trouble believing that they're about as smart as us, just in a very different way that doesn't involve tools.

[ Parent | on HN ]