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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34981 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Why larger animals need larger brains to get same intelligence?

In 1960s, Harry J Jerison collected and plotted data on brain size-body size on log scale. He also calculated different fit lines for mammals, birds and reptiles, and they have different slopes, though often slope 2/3 is used for convenience.

While difference between reptile slope and bird slope is probably insignificant, between birds and mammals probably is (about 0.580 vs 0.72 IIRC).

Extrapolating from this data, a 70kg bird might have same intelligence as human with only 400g brain instead of 1400g. A card which birds dinosaurs didn't get to put good use for.

AFAIK, two things come together to give birds small but powerful brains, and better mass/compute scaling:

  1. Cell size can vary between species, and birds have pressure to miniaturize to reduce weight.

  2. Smaller bodies have less stuff (skin, muscles, etc) that need a nervous connection and a part of the brain to process data from and/or issue commands to. See Encephalization quotient. Eg. Women have the same IQ as men, despite having, on average, 90% of the brain size.

EDIT: This post by Scott might be of interest.

  1. not all birds fly, and anyway birds have slop similar to those of reptiles.

  2. larger bodies have about same number of components as smaller ones, and very easily large animal might have less degrees of freedom than small (horse vs. rat or even snake). Snakes are small brained despite having more degrees of freedom than any mammal. And the only parts which larger bodies have more complex are gastrointestinal tract and lungs, are not individiually controlled by brain.

not all birds fly, and anyway birds have slop similar to those of reptiles.

Nor do species lose adaptations the moment the original reason they got them disappears, but I concede the point.

larger bodies have about same number of components as smaller ones [...] And the only parts which larger bodies have more complex are gastrointestinal tract and lungs

'Components' is an artificial category. The number of cells which sense are what matters (since the collected data needs to be processed, otherwise the cell is worse than useless). If you need to sense with the same precision on 1 mm^2 of skin and on 5 mm^2, you'd need more neurons for transport and processing for the larger patch of skin. Not necessarily 5 times more, you can compress the data or whatever, but you definitely need more than for the 1 mm^2 patch.

'Components' is an artificial category.

Are separate muscles and bones artifical categories?

If you need to sense with the same precision on 1 mm^2 of skin and on 5 mm^2

The premise is false.

you can compress the data or whatever

If you send intensity and location of averaged spot, then it's slow-growing O(log(Area))

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