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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

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_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

samatman 4y ago
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.