It's not just weight -- it does seem to actually have more neurons and glia numerically. The rest of your comment stands and is probably the most likely / defau

It's not just weight -- it does seem to actually have more neurons and glia numerically. The rest of your comment stands and is probably the most likely / default hypothesis, but there are others. What if elephant brains actually do outperform ours but along an axis we're not seeing because... well... it's something we suck so bad at that we can't see it in another being. A relevant story: I've seen people with insanely great social abilities. I had a friend once who could walk into a room and tell me the personal situations of everyone and we checked this once by starting a few conversations. She had a near-perfect hit rate at spotting things like people who had recently broken up, people who were unemployed, etc. It was spooky. I'm nowhere near this good and might be "on the spectrum," though it's also possible that my preference for technical and intellectual stuff from a very early age just wired my brain for them. My brain only has so many neurons so I assume there must be a trade-off in what we dedicate them to. The woman in my story above came from a weird kind of complex abusive family and extended social situation (can't go into it and would be too long), so for her she might have dedicated a ton of mental resources to understanding social environments as a matter of personal safety as a child. I was much more "spectrum"-y when I was a kid and a teenager. For the first 18 years of my life I was kind of oblivious to deep social cues. My social awareness improved really dramatically in my 18-25 years, and it felt very much like being color blind and then gradually acquiring the ability to see color. I became aware of cognitive abilities and aspects of existence that were all around me for the first 18 years of my life but that did not "exist" for me. As I acquired these abilities I started to spot them and have respect for them in others. Prior to this I didn't notice any variation in other peoples' social abilities because I couldn't notice variation in an ability I didn't have and couldn't perceive. Neurons are demanding cells. They eat a lot of glucose and need a lot of fats, oils, and micronutrients for their formation and maintenance. It doesn't make evolutionary sense that elephants would maintain a bunch of neurons that do nothing to boost their fitness. Brains aren't externally visible like antlers, tusks, etc. and so serve no intrinsic display or offense/defense function. It could be an evolutionary accident of hypertrophy. Evolution is not such a greedy optimizer that this is impossible. But the high cost of brains is certainly suggestive of evolutionary benefit. Edit: I've brought up these kinds of ideas in other contexts and I've found that they bother some people. People almost get defensive, like it's a personal affront to suggest that there might be alien cognitive abilities. I feel that if we ever do meet actual ET aliens we are going to get some kind of massive reality check. The obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/