Elephants have 3x larger brains than humans. I know that their brain-to-body mass ratio is similar to humans, but shouldn’t the absolute volume matter too? It’s like having 1 CPU vs 3 CPUs, if they are comparable, then the 3 CPUs should outperform the 1. And don’t we have similarly structured brains? How come they are not nearly as smart as us?
In: Biology
I don’t know about elephants, but blue whales are as intelligent as humans, but they don’t have hands or anything similar to craft things. So they are forced to stay the way they are.
It isn’t about the size of the brain it is the number of connections within the brain, larger animals in general have larger brains mainly to keep track of their own body. 3 CPUs from the 1990’s aren’t better than 1 CPU from today.
I don’t have an answer to this, but are all mammalian brain cells created equal? Keeping up with your computing metaphor, Perhaps the 3X brain of an elephant is like a Pentium 75 processor compared to a newer generation. Much larger but fewer transistors and thus less powerful?
There are different regions in the brain, and each region has a specialised function. The “smartness” that we observe in humans is primarily associated with the cerebral cortex, which is the front part of the brain. Elephants have less absolute number of neurons in this region compared to humans. Elephants have heaps of neurons in the cerebellum, which is associated with motor function amongst other things.
So, following from your analogy, the brain is more akin to the whole computer, and the neurons are the components. The elephant brain has many hard drives, while the human brain has many CPUs. I’m not very good with computer components. I hope the analogy makes sense.
I’m gonna use your CPU comparison. Older CPUs were bigger then they are now, but we managed to squeeze more transistors into smaller space and make them more efficient. The part of brain that is essentially the “CPU” in elephants is twice as large, but it packs three times less neurons compared to human “CPU”.
I just think of it as all animals have superpowers:
Humans have super knowledge
Elephants can store water in there nose and cool themselves
There’s more but an elephant probably evoled to do that instead of being smart
Brain size is not everything. Intelligence is not solely based on computing power, but also having a smart program that runs on it.
Elefants are somewhat intelligent, they even have something that resembles a language (infrasound growling) and good memory.
But they aren’t “crafty”. Their way of living doesn’t promote learning more because they are already the biggest toughest guys, they don’t need smart coordinated hunting tactics.
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