AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
How many neurons does the brain have8/6/2023 ![]() Different species have moral worth in proportion to the amount of complex thought they can do.Different animal species have moral worth in proportion to how smart they are.Different species have moral worth in proportion to how many neurons they have.If you believe some variation on one of the following: Humans do have unusually high numbers of neurons per kilogram than other animals, but far, far fewer than, for instance, a small fish or an ant. Ethology would also be interesting.)Īnd the trend is also roughly true for neuron-county:body-mass. (Synapse counts might be better, but those are hard to come by for different species. Conveniently, I also have a ton of numbers put together on number of neurons. Getting even smaller, insects have higher brain:body-mass ratios than any vertebrate we know of: more like 1 in 6.īut brain mass isn’t quite what we want – brains are mostly water, and there are a lot of non-neuron cells in brains. A mouse has a comparable brain:body-mass ratio to a human. But as we look at smaller animals, that ratio goes up again. ![]() Among large animals, humans have famously enormous brains for our size – the highest of any large animal, it seems. Let’s look a classic measurement, the brain-mass:body-mass ratio.* Smarter animals generally have larger brain sizes for their body mass, compared to animals of similar size. ![]() One thing that surprised me when working on How Many Neurons Are There was the number of neurons in the brains of very small animals. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |