Here are some simple facts before we rush into the post:
- Males have bigger brains than females (slightly).
- Nobody knows what makes a genius brain a genius brain even after studying postmortem brains.
- Geniuses do better than the rest of the others in their fields of endeavour.
When talking about penises it is very normal to say that size does not matter but is this the case? Does the size of the brain's penis matter?…sorry wrong topic.
Many of the people who studied this organ however have some stuff to say. They had been throwing talks about high brow and low brow since the dawn of this topic. There had been some observations that those that had a big head (usually big-brained) had the better intersect. The question is did these people know what they were talking about or were they just throwing things on the wall to see if one would stick.
According to the Michigan state university publication, the answer to this question might be a yes.
The Bigger the Brain The Sightly the better?
Did you know that the human brain grows until a person is in their 30s or 40s? A study done in 46 adult brains showed that the male brain was about 1,274 cubic centimetres and the female brain was 1,131 cubic centimetres the density of the brain is similar to salt and water solution and it weighs 1.3kg.
The story writer Ivan Turgenev’s brain was weighed and it was found to be about 2 kg breaking the limit for brain weight., his brain weighed 2,021 grams and Anatole, another writer’s brain weighed 1,017 grams.
The main difference in intelligence between people is the time taken to grasp new concepts, plan and learn from life’s experiences and calculate possibilities. These parameters are assessed with intelligence tests.
The findings in these intelligence tests are the same even after 70 years.
When these intelligence tests are done, they usually are linked to the success a person will have in life, the success at work, and how social the person and they are linked to health and life expectancy. In one of the studies done on 1 million Swedish males, an SD of 1 on the IQ scale was associated with a 32% reduction in mortality.
Brain size and Intelligence
In the past, the only way to assess this was to measure the cranium and brain when the person is dead. But in these years with new technology such as the Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine, it is possible to estimate these values. It has become a normal procedure to check everyone's brain size alongside other investigations.
What we know from these studies with the MRI is that there is a weak correlation between brain size and intelligence. The value is somewhere between 9 to 16% of the person's intelligence. The areas of the brain that are responsible for mental activities are the parietal, temporal and frontal lobes of the brain. These areas were noted to be thickened.
Nobody is sure if this means that having a bigger brain simply would mean that a person is intelligent (like we can’t predict it for children for example) But we know that it is a variable finding those who are intelligent.
There are more recent experiments now that take into account special areas of the brain that are part of a person’s identity like a fingerprint. These have been better at predicting intelligence.
Another known detail is that the brain capacity in Homo Neandeterthalensis is also close to 10% bigger than the modern human skull capacity. These cavemen were outdone by modern humans nearly 30 to 40 thousand years ago. How smart were they to lose a fight to the smaller-brained descendants?
Brain Size in Different Animals
When we look at other animals it becomes more evident that we don’t know the relationship between intelligence and brain size. There are many behaviours in other animals that can be looked at as intelligent maybe not in the sense we speak of when we talk about human intelligence but these animals can learn, they can tell objects in space apart and hear and interpret sound they make decisions and even take cognizant of the future in their planning.
Bees can recognize faces, point to directions and make it through difficult mazes. They can track down scent they manage to achieve all of this with less than 1 million nerve cells. Yet they have a better-linked communication system.
Animals with bigger bodies have bigger brains
This is usually because the brain has to reach more surface area on the skin and more muscles have to be innervated and generally speaking the brain just has more work to do. For humans, the brain-to-body ratio is about 2% when compared to a whale where it is about 0.1% This means that we have bigger brains considering our body size.
The shrew however beats humans in this regard. The brain-to-body ratio of a shrew is about 10%.
The thing is that most of this information still appears to be meaningless because we still don’t know why the neocortex of humans does not have the most nerve cells.
In a study, they found that some dolphins had twice as many nerve cells in their neocortex as humans. If the neocortex was the site of intelligence, these dolphins should be the most intelligent species but they are not. This is why it is clear that we have not wrapped our minds around this relationship between brain size and intelligence.
Going into these studies, humans were sure they would find the reason for intelligence in the place where thoughts and behaviour originate from but what happened, in the end, is that we came out of the encounter even more confused because humans do not have the most never cells, or the biggest brains, or the biggest brain to body ratio but yet we evolved to be the smartest creature on the planet.
What do you think this post left out with intelligence and the brain…let me know in the comment section below.