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DISTRIBUTION CURVE. “The relatively large human cerebral cortex, therefore, is not different from the cerebral cortex of other animals in its relative number of neurons.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

A LEVELING FACT. “Remarkably, the human cerebral cortex, which represents 82% of brain mass, holds only 19% of all neurons in the human brain – a fraction that is similar to the fraction that we observed in several other primates, rodents, and even insectivores.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this journey into the arcane discussion of whose brain is bigger, and the vain search for evidence of human exceptionalism. Nature teaches us that natural diversity is enormous and there are Bell Curves in most things, but more, that exceptionalism of a single species is conflated nonsense, coming from a long tradition of being at the center of the universe, and at the top of the ladder of being. View in LinkedIn

THE REAL MEASURE. “Quantitative changes in the neuronal composition of the brain could therefore be a main driving force that, through the exponential combination of processing units, and therefore of computational abilities, leads to events that may look like “jumps” in the evolution of brains and intelligence.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

MORE THAN MASS. “To conclude that the human brain is a linearly scaled-up primate brain, with just the expected number of neurons for a primate brain of its size, is not to state that it is the cognitive abilities of non-human primates and other large-brained animals progress, it becomes increasingly likely that humans do not have truly unique cognitive abilities, and hence must differ from these animals not qualitatively, but rather in the combination and extent of abilities such as theory of mind, imitation and social cognition.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

DEATH OF EXCEPTIONALISM. “One consequence of this realization is that sheer size alone, or in relation to body size, is not an adequate parameter to qualify, or disqualify, the human brain as “special”.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

NAIL IN THE PROVERBIAL. “The different cellular scaling rules that apply to rodents and primates strongly indicate that it is not valid to use brain size as a proxy for number of neurons across humans, whales, elephants and other large-brained species belonging to different mammalian orders.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

CONTROVERSIAL. "Visual perceptual learning (VPL) is defined as visual performance improvement after visual experiences. VPL is often highly specific for a visual feature presented during training. However, results of neurophysiological studies have been highly controversial concerning whether the plasticity underlying VPL occurs within the visual cortex." (T. Watanabe et al.). https://lnkd.in/dGMAxbU View in LinkedIn

BODY SIZE ERROR. “This raises the possibility that mass and body mass across species are only correlated, rather than brain mass being determined by body mass, as presumed in studies that focus on the variation of residuals after regression onto body size.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn