7 ms·

The Paradox of the Elephant Brain

100 points by srikar 10y ago

ejk314 10y ago
I'd be interested to see how crows and dolphins fit in this ordering.
- superobserver 10y ago
  Corvids and cetaceans would be good for future study, but I doubt we're in for much of a surprise. This is a study in line with interspecies differences. Intraspecies differences still require some teasing out. E.g., how does a Gauss differ from Joe Q. Public?
- joeyo 10y ago
  Strictly speaking birds don't even have a cerebral cortex. That is, cortex evolved in mammals after the split with the last common ancestor of mammals and birds. So in that sense, birds would be at the very back of the ordering, along with reptiles, fish and the other vertebrates that lack a cortex. That said, birds do have a well developed pallium that seems to play a similar role as cortex does in mammals, even though it is structurally quite different. If you let pallium stand in for cortex, crows would probably do okay. It seems likely that avian pallium performs similar computations as cortex, despite having a different implementation. The more interesting question, in my opinion, is not who has the most neurons of any particular type, but how those cells enact computations. Does the avian pallium have representations that are similar to mammalian cortex. In other words, does it solve problems in similar ways/using similar algorithms as cortex or did its early divergence allow it to find different solutions?
  - mc808 10y ago
    To me it seems our ability to preserve and share knowledge is far more important for our intellectual pursuits than the individual brain is. E.g. it took hundreds of thousands of years for someone to think up the number 0, and then it spread like wildfire (after the authorities stopped resisting). What I find curious is that parrots can vocalize at least as well as humans, they show some pretty solid reasoning ability, their tongue is practically an opposable thumb, and yet they don't seem to have developed complex spoken language or technology. I wonder what's missing from bird brains that would help them with language. Actually, I just had a flash of memory about some part of the brain involved with putting ideas into linear sequences, as we do with words. Maybe that plays a part.
thaw13579 10y ago
Another factor is that body mass is highly correlated to brain mass: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/images/imgs_sml_ver3/7_13.gif https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/doc...
- gweinberg 10y ago
  Except when it isn't. Dinosaurs had much smaller brains than humans, not just relative to body mass but absolutely. A big body does not necessarily require a proportionally large brain.
  - thaw13579 10y ago
    It's usually found when looking within mammals and is only a first approximation at best, but it seems to be a useful one at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient
eutectic 10y ago
Related podcast: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-157-dr-herculano-houzel-on-what-made-the-human-brain-spec.html http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-157-dr-herculan...
gumby 10y ago
Sigh. Certainly the human brain is the most optimized (so far!) for being a human and the elephant's the most optimized for being an elephant. Clearly you need more neurons than a few to get higher functions, but above some (probably tiny) threshold structure dominates. It's like deriving function and performance by counting the number of transistors on a chip. We see Apple's A9 is currently the peak performer ($/W, $/FLOPS) for a mobile device with a big screen... but is still very very far away from Intel's general purpose chips. Does that mean one is "better"? No, they just picked different optimization points. Far more interesting is why a chihuahua with a walnut-sized brain is just as smart as an irish wolfhound that has a brain that masses about as much as a whole chihuahua!
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  > Certainly the human brain is the most optimized (so far!) for being a human and the elephant's the most optimized for being an elephant. But... if you put a human brain in an elephant, wouldn't it be "better" at getting food, killing competing elephant bulls, and passing genes around? I'm not sold on the self-evidence of elephant brains being the best elephants...
  - shasta 10y ago
    Maybe this isn't enough data points, but I just tested this and the elephant with the human brain just lies there on the ground.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    Those neurons not in the pre-frontal cortex are probably helping with things like controlling the complex trunk which contains over 40,000 muscles (compared to the only six hundred and some muscles in the entire human body).
  - gumby 10y ago
    I think you need to have a better understanding of how evolution works. It's not the Victorian model where the human is more evolved much less more perfect than any other animal. In fact animals that reproduce faster have more opportunity for evolutionary impact -- the cockroach is far "more evolved" than a human. Consider it a big parallel hill-climbing problem with each animal being a local optimum for its environment. A human, including its brain, is the best general-purpose device for transmitting genes, but the human brain lacks structures that would be useful to an elephant, and vice versa. Brains are not general-purpose devices. Consider my dog: the surface area of his nose is probably about the size of a football field and I would bet his olfactory cortex is about the size of his visual cortex (in some breeds, it's probably even larger). Of course our visual system is more dominant than our olfactory system. So that's a simple example...would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other? [Edit: fixed the amusing typo "hill-sliming" -- we are not snails!]
lossolo 10y ago
I wonder how much information brain can store, especially in context of people with "photographic memory".
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a3n 10y ago
> With three times as many neurons, why doesn’t the elephant brain outperform ours? Maybe it does. Maybe they're philosophers.
- Fjolsvith 10y ago
  They'd probably debate that.
- logicallee 10y ago
  Hard to be a philosopher while having to invent philosophy in your head without hearing or speaking with anyone or reading anything. How good of a mathematician can someone become if they have to invent mathematics on a silent island with no books or even their parents teaching them to count? Without language, this is the situation an elephant-philosopher is in... I heard an interesting argument for what a chance occurrence language is in humans: after all we talk by using the organs we chew with, fashioning our lips and tongues into phonemes. If the freak "language gene" were given to elephants (spliced into DNA etc) so that they can develop phonemic values over generations using whatever speechlike abilities their mouths do have, it would be interesting to note whether they can develop philosophy then. But man had modern brain and speech abilities for tens of thousands of years before our cultural situation and heritage became interesting. You likely wouldn't be impressed with the philosophical world view of members of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe tens of thousands of years ago who had no writing. Interesting, surely, but as an curiosity. Would speaking elephants left to their own devices be the same? Or do humans have higher cognitive processes they cannot match, in addition to lacking our language skills? So that they would not be put at a prototypical human level, but insteqd forever stuck at the elephant level, their new language ability notwithstanding...
quadrangle 10y ago
How disappointing. The thing I most wanted out of this article was to learn what was so significant and powerful about the elephant cerebellum. Surely, that means elephants have superior abilities in the aspects relevant to the cerebellum. I want to hear about the amazing things elephants can do that this enables.
- Fjolsvith 10y ago
  They have a long nose that they can use to grab things, and they can even spray water with that nose!
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    Their nose is amazing, of course. Is all the mass of their cerebellum connected to using their noses??
tim333 10y ago
They seem to skip the obvious explanation of why we tend to be smarter than Elephants is that our brains have in some ways a better design. It's not all about how many kilos of neurones you have or cows would be discussing metaphysics. Evolution works by random DNA mutations and quite likely we just got lucky in hitting some good ones.
SilasX 10y ago
It doesn't seem to talk about the plausible explanation that the ratio (of brain mass to body) also matters. So elephants have a bigger one but also loses a lot of its processing power to a greater number of neural signals (which probably increase linearly with weight). According to this page, humans have the highest ratio except for a few species that have very small brains in absolute size, which probably miss out on benefits to scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Comparisons_between_groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Compa... I would also suggest that they're very disadvantaged in not having developed the tools for more wide scale intergenerstional transmission of cultural knowledge.
lttlrck 10y ago
So what do elephants use all those neurons for?
planck01 10y ago
The elephant has a bigger brain, but it also has a much larger body it has to monitor and control which takes brain power. The sperm whale has an even bigger brain, and an even larger body. It all comes down to the relative brainsize / bodysize. This wikipedia article describes it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient And as you can see in that article, our quotient is far the highest of all animals. I find it weird that the authors of the article don't mention these things and do not seem to be aware of this.
crimsonalucard 10y ago
Superiority is the wrong word. The author should say human like behavior is correlated with a higher number of neurons in the cerebral cortex.. Additionally, I remember dolphins had more neurons in overall in their cerebral cortex..

100 points by srikar 10y ago

ejk314 10y ago

I'd be interested to see how crows and dolphins fit in this ordering.

superobserver 10y ago
Corvids and cetaceans would be good for future study, but I doubt we're in for much of a surprise. This is a study in line with interspecies differences. Intraspecies differences still require some teasing out. E.g., how does a Gauss differ from Joe Q. Public?
joeyo 10y ago
Strictly speaking birds don't even have a cerebral cortex. That is, cortex evolved in mammals after the split with the last common ancestor of mammals and birds. So in that sense, birds would be at the very back of the ordering, along with reptiles, fish and the other vertebrates that lack a cortex. That said, birds do have a well developed pallium that seems to play a similar role as cortex does in mammals, even though it is structurally quite different. If you let pallium stand in for cortex, crows would probably do okay. It seems likely that avian pallium performs similar computations as cortex, despite having a different implementation. The more interesting question, in my opinion, is not who has the most neurons of any particular type, but how those cells enact computations. Does the avian pallium have representations that are similar to mammalian cortex. In other words, does it solve problems in similar ways/using similar algorithms as cortex or did its early divergence allow it to find different solutions?
- mc808 10y ago
  To me it seems our ability to preserve and share knowledge is far more important for our intellectual pursuits than the individual brain is. E.g. it took hundreds of thousands of years for someone to think up the number 0, and then it spread like wildfire (after the authorities stopped resisting). What I find curious is that parrots can vocalize at least as well as humans, they show some pretty solid reasoning ability, their tongue is practically an opposable thumb, and yet they don't seem to have developed complex spoken language or technology. I wonder what's missing from bird brains that would help them with language. Actually, I just had a flash of memory about some part of the brain involved with putting ideas into linear sequences, as we do with words. Maybe that plays a part.

thaw13579 10y ago

Another factor is that body mass is highly correlated to brain mass: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/images/imgs_sml_ver3/7_13.gif https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/doc...

gweinberg 10y ago
Except when it isn't. Dinosaurs had much smaller brains than humans, not just relative to body mass but absolutely. A big body does not necessarily require a proportionally large brain.
- thaw13579 10y ago
  It's usually found when looking within mammals and is only a first approximation at best, but it seems to be a useful one at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient

eutectic 10y ago

Related podcast: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-157-dr-herculano-houzel-on-what-made-the-human-brain-spec.html http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-157-dr-herculan...

gumby 10y ago

Sigh. Certainly the human brain is the most optimized (so far!) for being a human and the elephant's the most optimized for being an elephant. Clearly you need more neurons than a few to get higher functions, but above some (probably tiny) threshold structure dominates. It's like deriving function and performance by counting the number of transistors on a chip. We see Apple's A9 is currently the peak performer ($/W, $/FLOPS) for a mobile device with a big screen... but is still very very far away from Intel's general purpose chips. Does that mean one is "better"? No, they just picked different optimization points. Far more interesting is why a chihuahua with a walnut-sized brain is just as smart as an irish wolfhound that has a brain that masses about as much as a whole chihuahua!

nothrabannosir 10y ago
> Certainly the human brain is the most optimized (so far!) for being a human and the elephant's the most optimized for being an elephant. But... if you put a human brain in an elephant, wouldn't it be "better" at getting food, killing competing elephant bulls, and passing genes around? I'm not sold on the self-evidence of elephant brains being the best elephants...
- shasta 10y ago
  Maybe this isn't enough data points, but I just tested this and the elephant with the human brain just lies there on the ground.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  Those neurons not in the pre-frontal cortex are probably helping with things like controlling the complex trunk which contains over 40,000 muscles (compared to the only six hundred and some muscles in the entire human body).
- gumby 10y ago
  I think you need to have a better understanding of how evolution works. It's not the Victorian model where the human is more evolved much less more perfect than any other animal. In fact animals that reproduce faster have more opportunity for evolutionary impact -- the cockroach is far "more evolved" than a human. Consider it a big parallel hill-climbing problem with each animal being a local optimum for its environment. A human, including its brain, is the best general-purpose device for transmitting genes, but the human brain lacks structures that would be useful to an elephant, and vice versa. Brains are not general-purpose devices. Consider my dog: the surface area of his nose is probably about the size of a football field and I would bet his olfactory cortex is about the size of his visual cortex (in some breeds, it's probably even larger). Of course our visual system is more dominant than our olfactory system. So that's a simple example...would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other? [Edit: fixed the amusing typo "hill-sliming" -- we are not snails!]

lossolo 10y ago

I wonder how much information brain can store, especially in context of people with "photographic memory".

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

a3n 10y ago

> With three times as many neurons, why doesn’t the elephant brain outperform ours? Maybe it does. Maybe they're philosophers.

Fjolsvith 10y ago
They'd probably debate that.
logicallee 10y ago
Hard to be a philosopher while having to invent philosophy in your head without hearing or speaking with anyone or reading anything. How good of a mathematician can someone become if they have to invent mathematics on a silent island with no books or even their parents teaching them to count? Without language, this is the situation an elephant-philosopher is in... I heard an interesting argument for what a chance occurrence language is in humans: after all we talk by using the organs we chew with, fashioning our lips and tongues into phonemes. If the freak "language gene" were given to elephants (spliced into DNA etc) so that they can develop phonemic values over generations using whatever speechlike abilities their mouths do have, it would be interesting to note whether they can develop philosophy then. But man had modern brain and speech abilities for tens of thousands of years before our cultural situation and heritage became interesting. You likely wouldn't be impressed with the philosophical world view of members of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe tens of thousands of years ago who had no writing. Interesting, surely, but as an curiosity. Would speaking elephants left to their own devices be the same? Or do humans have higher cognitive processes they cannot match, in addition to lacking our language skills? So that they would not be put at a prototypical human level, but insteqd forever stuck at the elephant level, their new language ability notwithstanding...

quadrangle 10y ago

How disappointing. The thing I most wanted out of this article was to learn what was so significant and powerful about the elephant cerebellum. Surely, that means elephants have superior abilities in the aspects relevant to the cerebellum. I want to hear about the amazing things elephants can do that this enables.

Fjolsvith 10y ago
They have a long nose that they can use to grab things, and they can even spray water with that nose!
- quadrangle 10y ago
  Their nose is amazing, of course. Is all the mass of their cerebellum connected to using their noses??

tim333 10y ago

They seem to skip the obvious explanation of why we tend to be smarter than Elephants is that our brains have in some ways a better design. It's not all about how many kilos of neurones you have or cows would be discussing metaphysics. Evolution works by random DNA mutations and quite likely we just got lucky in hitting some good ones.

SilasX 10y ago

It doesn't seem to talk about the plausible explanation that the ratio (of brain mass to body) also matters. So elephants have a bigger one but also loses a lot of its processing power to a greater number of neural signals (which probably increase linearly with weight). According to this page, humans have the highest ratio except for a few species that have very small brains in absolute size, which probably miss out on benefits to scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Comparisons_between_groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Compa... I would also suggest that they're very disadvantaged in not having developed the tools for more wide scale intergenerstional transmission of cultural knowledge.

lttlrck 10y ago

So what do elephants use all those neurons for?

planck01 10y ago

The elephant has a bigger brain, but it also has a much larger body it has to monitor and control which takes brain power. The sperm whale has an even bigger brain, and an even larger body. It all comes down to the relative brainsize / bodysize. This wikipedia article describes it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient And as you can see in that article, our quotient is far the highest of all animals. I find it weird that the authors of the article don't mention these things and do not seem to be aware of this.

crimsonalucard 10y ago

Superiority is the wrong word. The author should say human like behavior is correlated with a higher number of neurons in the cerebral cortex.. Additionally, I remember dolphins had more neurons in overall in their cerebral cortex..