eli5 if they had our brain computing power, could animals be as athletically gifted as humans?

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Like how humans can hit a hole-in-one. Or an ice skater doing a triple axle. Or a snowboarder doing one of their insane tricks. If animals could think like we do, would they be able to do the same things?

In: Biology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Well sure depending on what you mean by think.

The brain has lots of things dedicated to different stuff and the human brain has a fairly large region dedicated to motion control/balance/hand eye coordination, etc. Mostly this is done in the cerebellum, though other regions come into play. All of this gives humans (and to an extend primates) a boost in coordination that species don’t really get.

We don’t generally consider muscle memory as part of our thought process though. Instead it’s something you train with practice, much like exercise trains the body. So if you consider muscle memory as part of human intelligence (and I do personally) then sortof.

You also run into lots of problems with the actual body structure of most animals. Notably a lack of thumbs puts a lot of sports right out the door.

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