brain size as a function of population

ah. yet another left brain article about the synergy of the hive mind and its effects on brain function

we do not have to wait around 10,000 years for a significant evolutionary transformation to express itself. The trigger may already be there, lying dormant in our genes, waiting for the the right time and place to express itself.

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There are currently two ambitious projects straddling artificial intelligence and neuroscience, each with the aim of building big brains that work. One is The Blue Brain Project, and it describes its aim in the following one-liner:

“The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.”

The second is a multi-institution IBM-centered project called SyNAPSE, a press release which describes it as follows:

“In an unprecedented undertaking, IBM Research and five leading universities are partnering to create computing systems that are expected to simulate and emulate the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size.”

Oh, is that all!

The difficulties ahead of these groups are staggering, as they (surely) realize. But rather than discussing the many roadblocks likely to derail them, I want to focus on one way in which they are perhaps making things too difficult for themselves.

In particular, each aims to build a BIG brain, and I want to suggest here that perhaps they can get the intelligence they’re looking for without the BIG.

Why not go big? Because bigger brains are a pain in the neck, and not just for the necks that hold them up. As brains enlarge across species, they must modify their organization in radical ways in order to maintain their required interconnectedness. Convolutedness increases, number of cortical areas increases, number of synapses per neuron increases, white-to-gray matter ratio rises, and many other changes occur in order to accommodate the larger size. Building a bigger brain is an engineering nightmare, a nightmare you can see in the ridiculously complicated appearance of the dolphin brain relative to that of the shrew brain below – the complexity you see in that dolphin brain is due almost entirely to the “scaling backbends” it must do to connect itself up in an efficient manner despite its large size. (See
http://www.changizi.com/changizi_lab.html#neocortex
)

If the only way to get smarter brains was to build bigger brains, then these AI projects would have no choice but to embark upon a pain-in-the-neck mission. But bigger brains are not the only way to get smarter brains. Although for any fixed technology, bigger computers are typically smarter, this is not the case for brains. The best predictor of a mammal’s intelligence tends not to be its brain size, but its relative brain size. In particular, the best predictor of intelligence tends to be something called the encephalization quotient (a variant of a brain-body ratio), which quantifies how big the brain is once one has corrected for the size of the body in which it sits. The reason brain size is not a good predictor of intelligence is that the principal driver of brain size is body size, not intelligence at all. And we don’t know why. (See my ScientificBlogging piece on brain size, Why Doesn’t Size Matter…for The Brain?)

This opens up an alternative route to making an animal smarter. If it is brain-body ratio that best correlates with intelligence, then there are two polar opposite ways to increase this ratio. The first is to raise the numerator, i.e., to increase brain size while holding body size fixed, as the vertical arrow indicates in the figure below. That’s essentially what the Blue Brain and SyNAPSE projects are implicitly trying to do.

But there is a second way to increase intelligence: one can raise the brain-body ratio by lowering the denominator, i.e., by decreasing the size of the body, as shown by the horizontal arrow in the figure below. (In each case, the arrow shifts to a point that is at a greater vertical distance from the best-fit line below it, indicating its raised brain-body ratio.)

Rather than making a bigger brain, we can give the animal a smaller body! Either way, brain-body ratio rises, as potentially does the intelligence that the brain-body combo can support.

We’re not in a position today to understand the specific mechanisms that differ in the brains of varying size due to body size, so we cannot simply shrink the body and get a smarter beast. But, then again, we also don’t understand the specific mechanisms that differ in the brains of varying size! Building smarter via building larger brains is just as much a mystery as the prescription I am suggesting: to build smarter via building smaller bodies. And mine has the advantage that it avoids the engineering scaling nightmare for large brains.

For AI to actually somehow take this advice, though, they have to answer the following question: What counts as a body for these AI brains in the first place? Only after one becomes clear on what their bodies actually are (i.e., what size body the brains are being designed to support) can one begin to ask how to get by with less of it, and hope to eke out greater intelligence with less brain.

Perhaps this is the ace in the AI hole: perhaps AI researchers have greater freedom to shrink body size in ways nature could not, and thereby grow greater intelligence. Perhaps the AI devices that someday take over and enslave us will have mouse brains with fly bodies. I sure hope I’m there to see that.

This first appeared on March 9, 2010, as a feature at ScientificBlogging.com.

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Mark Changizi is a professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the author of The Vision Revolution (Benbella Books).

At about the time that I had made the personal commitment to only contribute to Open Access publishing (as service on editorial boards or peer review) I was contacted by Georg Striedter asking me to join the Editorial Board of Brain Behavior and Evolution. After hearing from him his views about the new direction he was planning to take the journal, I could not refuse. Georg Striedter took the Editorial position for the journal starting this year and a big change ensued. The journal now has a new section called Highlights and Perspectives in Neuroscience, and articles in this section have been made free to access. I have been quite impressed with this section, and the quality of the discussions there. As an example, you can go and look at Mark Changizi’s piece “Neuroscientis’s Embarassment: Artificial Intelligence’s Opportunity” and Anat Barnea’s piece “Wild Neurogenesis”. For the latter, I recommend reading first a great summary of the article around which the discussion centres which was posted by NeuroDojo when the article came out. Mark Changizi’s piece is self contained but you might also want to check this awesome discussion around brain size.

Many journals are opening up some of their content for free, and this is a good move. For example, on the 26^th of March, Nature Publishing broke the news that the Nature News content free of charge. This is a great section and it is wonderful to have that content available to the general public.

Don’t mess with technology, what about BioTorrents?

On the 10^th of April I participated in the Public Acta meeting in Wellington. One of the statements of the Wellington Declaration said that

“[Technological Protection Measures] should not infringe on or limit the rights of users to use or access copyright material in a manner that would be permitted without the TPM”

One of the arguments raised that day, is that technology is sometimes attacked when it is can be used to infringe copyrighted works, but that restricting such technologies may infringe on the ability of accessing material that is otherwise legally available.

This week saw the publication of a paper in PLoS One by Morgan GI Langille and Jonathan A Eisen. BioTorrents: A file sharing service for Scientific Data. As Tim O’Reilly said on his Tweet, this is a great use of the BitTorrent technology. Here is a technology that has valuable applications and should, too be protected as such.

One may ask what prompted me to attend the PublicACTA meeting. The answer is simple: Most scientific information is behind the copyright that as authors we often transfer to the journals where our work is published (for journals outside the Open Access model). Education, Health and Science rely heavily on having good access to this information. Any decision to regulate copyright will inevitably have an impact on Education, Health, Science and Technology. So ACTA cannot be framed around the protection of recording artists and the film industry and not consider its implications for these other areas of public good. The text of ACTA will be made public next week, at which time I hope scientists, educators and health professionals will collaborate in making sure the implications for their fields are taken into account.

This shouldn’t be shocking as many animals have intelligence. Of course, there are many different levels of intelligence. We underestimate many animals for their seeming lack of intelligence. For example, squirrels, pigs and pigeons are of the top 10 smartest on the planet. The pig being the 6th in the line (7th including humans.) Sorry, Wilbur! You’re just too tasty.

Dolphins find themselves about second on this list behind chimpanzees. Although, there is debate among the scientific community that dolphins are more self-aware, intelligent and higher-developed abstract thought. Dolphins exhibit many qualities like humans. Dolphins travel and live in large pods (communities of dolphins) and are extremely social. They have a complex language system using clicks and squeaks that scientists are still unraveling. Humans are proud of their brains. This is for obvious reasons. It has helped us take over the world and top the food chain. Dr. Lori Marino, of Emory University, in Atlanta, GA, says that human brain size is seven times larger than what should be expected by body to brain ratio. To put brain size/intelligence into perspective we observe chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are well known within popular culture because they are a close relative to ourselves. Their intelligence is tested and well-documented because of this. Chimpanzee brain size is said to be two to three times larger than what would be expected. Dolphin brain size is five times larger than expected.

Dolphins can learn many complex tasks, signs/signals, and have the ability to teach other dolphins. They are conscious of themselves and other individuals of of species. They are even smart enough to be aware of sentence structure through communication.

Click here and you can view part 2/3 and 3/3

If dolphins are intelligent as this suggests then it may be safe to assume that dolphins are well-aware of what is happening to them. Dolphins and their families are being killed (Might I say “murdered”?) and they are conscious of their fates. It is a cold-hearted business the eating of other animals. If cows and chickens were this intelligence would we still eat them? Where do you draw the line?

…”AT EINSTEIN’s autopsy in 1955, his brain was something of a disappointment: it turned out to be a tad smaller than the average Joe’s. Indeed, later studies have suggested a minimal link between brain size and intelligence. It seems brain quality rather than quantity is key.”

Mark: What is intelligence? How much confidence can we have in the methods used to quantify it, when our understanding of the human brain is so limited?

…”SUBCONSCIOUS thought is the brain’s dumb autopilot – the chump behind repetitive tasks, Freudian slips and all the other things we do “without thinking”. That was certainly the prevailing view in the 20th century, but the subconscious has lately gone up in the world. It takes centre stage in creativity, puts the “eureka!” into problem-solving, plays a crucial role in learning and memory, and it’s even better at making tough decisions than rational analysis is (New Scientist, 1 December 2007, p 42).”…

Is captivity driving killer whales mad?

             Talk turned to the deadly dangers of a fisherman’s life at sea.  Enormous waves capsizing a tiny vessel in a ferocious storm and sending it to the bottom in minutes; becoming lost in a blinding fog so thick the familiar bow of the boat is gone, and crashing on the rocks; becoming ensnarled in the rigging and being towed under with the crab pots to a watery grave.  John Hurwitz, a white whiskered, salty Dungeness crab fisherman speaking from the deck of his boat the Irene Marie confessed his greatest fear to me.  “The only thing that scares me out there are the killer whales.  When I see one we clear the deck.  I’m worried that they will leap across the deck and grab me.”

            That was three weeks ago, before the circus whale known as Tilikum, snatched its trainer, Dawn Brancheau by her hair and pulled her into the tank at Sea World.  Shaking her like a rag doll, Dawn Brancheau was killed in front of hundreds of shocked spectators.  Disillusioned and confused the public has tried to understand the dysfunctional psyche of this beloved animal turned murder.  This particular individual is a serial killer.  This is the third trainer this whale has killed. 

            As a marine biologist my specialization was shark research, but the most vicious attack I ever witnessed at sea was a pod of killer whales tormenting a helpless grey whale.    Grey whales are much larger than killer whales, but the killers come in packs.  Like a mob, the killer whales had circled the grey whale turned belly up defensively to protect her vulnerable belly.  The killers raided in turns from every direction as the rest of the pack circled the helpless animal.  Taking turns a killer would leap out of the water with the amazing speed and power of a dolphin and crash their 9 tons of weight down on the grey whale as the others bit at the victim as she was driven under or biting when she rolled over to gasp a quick breath through the blowhole on the top of her head.  Killer whales go for the grey whale’s rich tongue.  They leave the carcass for the sharks and other scavengers.

            These whales were named by people of the sea who knew them well.  All animals prey on some other life form, but these whales are called killers.  They were given this name because these animals have the intelligence to organize themselves into social groups and attack ferociously with military cunning.  Invincible at their pinnacle atop the food chain, killer whales are the supreme hunters in the world’s oceans. 

            But to call them murders, and to wonder in disbelief how an animal so beloved and nurtured by human beings could become psychotically deranged and attack its handler, is to mistakenly project human qualities on an animal that has no concept of human beings or the ability to comprehend the capabilities that our remarkable brain provides.  The human brain so far outstrips the mental abilities of every other animal on the planet, comparison between the human mind and the cognitive abilities of any other animal is absurdly disproportionate. 

            Whales have the biggest brains on the planet in absolute size, and in proportion to body size the whale brain is one of the largest.  Throughout the animal kingdom brain size correlates with the social abilities of animals.  For the same reason evolution endowed Homo sapiens with a large brain, whales, and some species of sharks, have very large brains because they need them to coordinate their sophisticated social interactions.   But you cannot gauge intellect simply with a meat scale or a ruler.

            Superficially the whale brain somewhat resembles the human brain.  The whale’s cerebral cortex is highly convoluted—looking like kinky hair in comparison to the wavy convolutions of the human brain, but the whale cerebral cortex is thin and the cellular structure is much simpler than that of the human brain.  The human cerebral cortex has six layers of intricately wired brain cells in the cerebral cortex.  In animals like cats and raccoons the cellular structure of this part of the brain responsible for higher level cognitive function in humans is more complex than it is in whales. 

            The tragic death at Sea World has opened debate about whether the confines of captivity are so cruel they drive these intelligent creatures mad.  Whales are wondrous creatures, but the reality is that the true nature of these animals is unfamiliar to most.  People are eager to project human thoughts and emotions on creatures that are adoringly intelligent–for an animal.  Adoring pet lovers who tenderly care for a dog or cat never feel that the abnormal life they provide these creatures is cruel, even though a dog may bite and a cat may scratch its owner.  These whales, called killers, are simply doing what they do.

Then my mind completely changed direction and I thought, “there needs to be humans to appreciate the beauty of nature — to create poems and pictures and share its beauty.” What an odd thought.  It seems, for the most part, humans are afraid of nature. Humans often don’t care about its beauty and want at minimum to control it or worse to exploit and destroy it.

In today’s day and age, it is impossible to be human and not take part in the destruction of nature.

Humans seem to be the only species on earth that tries to separate themselves from nature.  Why?  We’re certainly the only animal that fashions clothes for ourselves, builds houses with plumbing, electric and HVAC systems.

What happened in our evolution that separated us out from the other animals?

One theory suggests that while bacteria and viruses are fast genetic learners, higher life-forms with bigger brains are slow genetic learners.  Our bigger brain makes us slow genetic learners but fast environmental learners.  When environment changes for a bacteria, they genetically adapt.  When our environment changes we learn to adapt. Okay, so I guess our large brain is what separates us from bacteria, bugs and fish.  But why are so we separate from other mammals?

At what point did our brain become so large we could no longer be a part of nature?  Which harks back to the creation story in Genesis and the Garden of Eden.  The story, it is said, is a metaphor about becoming sexually aware.  Adam and Eve in the garden were naked and in a sense cavorting just like the animals until they ate from the fruit that gave them the knowledge of good and evil.  Being cast out of the garden symbolizes that you can’t go back to innocence.

For me, being cast out of the garden, symbolizes no longer being a part of nature.  Now man and woman will have to work hard, farm for food, build a home.  Not only is the connection with nature gone, but also the connection with God.  We no longer walk and talk with God, and it makes me wonder about the other animals if they still get to personally know God.

U.S. researchers writing in the medical journal Cerebral Cortex conclude that video game prowess correlates to the size of certain parts of one’s brain. Understanding the brain continues to be a complicated challenge, but this study shows that video game players with a larger nucleus accumbens, which is part of the brain’s reward center, outperformed other players. The players who performed best had larger sections deep in the center of the brain, known as the caudate and putamen. These areas of the brain are linked to learning new skills, adapting to change and multitasking.

“This is the first time that we’ve been able to take a real world task like a video game and show that the size of specific brain regions is predictive of performance and learning rates on this video game,” said Kirk Erickson, an author of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.

“The Boskops had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens.”

“Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149.

This is a score that would be labeled at the genius level. And if there was normal variability among Boskops, as among the rest of us, then perhaps 15 to 20 percent of them would be expected to score over 180. In a classroom with 35 big-headed, baby-faced Boskop kids, you would likely encounter five or six with IQ scores at the upper range of what has ever been recorded in human history. The Boskops coexisted with our Homo sapiens forebears. Just as we see the ancient Homo erectus as a savage primitive, Boskop may have viewed us in somewhat the same way.

They died and we lived, and we can’t answer the question why. Why didn’t they outthink the smaller-brained hominids like ourselves and spread across the planet? Perhaps they didn’t want to.”

Full Article [via Discover]

The Rutherford Medal, New Zealand’s top science prize, was awarded to Professor Peter Hunter from the Bioengineering Institute. Peter Hunter is also one of the minds behind the Physiome Project,

“…a worldwide public domain effort to provide a computational framework for understanding human and other eukaryotic physiology.”

Peter Hunter is the Director of the Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland, a great model of what can be done in science in New Zealand when great thinkers are given the opportunity to build upon great ideas. You can read more about Peter Hunter’s award here and here.

A great article “Open Source Science: A revolution from within” written by Vivian Wagner was published in Linux Insider:

“Just as open source software allows programmers to access the code in order to create new and improved versions of software, open source science gives the scientific community open and easy access to fundamental experiments, methods and data in order to facilitate more research. The goal, ultimately, is better science.”

This type of approach to science is becoming a successful alternative and perhaps one that will be more successful in a world where scientific funding is continuously on the decline. (via @plos on twitter)

Ed Yong from Not Exactly Rocket Science has a wonderful post on the energetic problem that comes with having a large brain, and the genetic changes that may be a tell-tale of the evolution of brain size. And if you are at all interested in the evolution of brain size, Mark Changizi has started an incredibly interesting discussion on the topic. Both the post and the comments make for a great read. (I also like that he opened this discussion up and did not restrict it to academic circles.)

A great video from National Geographic shows the “supercrocs” in action:

“Paul Sereno, Paleontologist, University of Chicago: These stubby teeth didnt even touch each other to snare a fish, no, they were hook-like, strong cylinders to grab onto a dinosaurs limb or neck and pull it into the water. We began to understand this animal as a hidden predator of the dinosaurs.”

And related to this a great tweet from @carlzimmer linking to a dinosaur story on 60 minutes.

Ten summer fellowships were awarded to students to take part in the Tamaki Transformation project, and Wednesday marked the celebration of the beginning of what we hope will be a great collaboration between the University of Auckland and the community. I am part of  one of these teams with a project that will be led by Fraser Peat, a Med Student at the University of Auckland, wher we will be looking at issues surrounding science and health related education and literacy in the community. The results of the summer work will be shared with the community in March next year.

This finding really amazed me, but we certainly see it in some birds like ravens and crows. They are no “birdbrains.”

Bigger Not Necessarily Better, When It Comes to Brains. ScienceDaily

This epic saga of elephants, African turmoil, triumph, comedy, tragedy, telegraphic toenails and scientific discovery ostensibly began in 1992. That was the year conservation scientist Caitlin O’Connell, then contracted by Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism to study elephant behaviour, noticed something odd going on by an Etosha water hole.

The elephants she was observing were lifting their feet, flapping their ears and from time to time standing on their toenails. There was an uncanny uniformity to their behaviour. It was coordinated.

The elephants clearly knew something that O’Connell didn’t. But how?

And “What,” she wondered “are those elephants doing with their feet?”

I say the saga ostensibly began in 1992. But in actual fact the story perhaps really started in a small soundproof chamber in Hawaii with O’Connell studying and recording the seismic love songs of a group of endemic planthoppers strutting their stuff on a little koa twig attached to a gramophone stylus. I might add at this point that the behaviour of scientists never ceases to bemuse me. Perhaps somebody should study it. Just a thought.

Anyway, the tiny bugs were sending Valentines Day signals (and listening to them) through their limbs and using their feet as transmitters. At the same time, making O’Connell conscious of the concept of sub-sonic rap.

The principle of this form of communication, O’Connell explains, is rather like detecting the approach of a train by putting one’s ear to the tracks and listening for vibrations. Or Kevin Costner hugging the ground in Dances with Wolves to feel the tremors caused by stampeding bison.

Certain species communicate by creating sound waves inaudible to the human ear that they dispatch through a physical medium – soil, water, or in the case of planthoppers, koa twigs. Other insects have been documented doing it, also some fish, lizards, snakes, amphibians and crocodiles. Mammals however don’t generally go in for this sort of bush telegraph. Blind mole rats, Namibia’s golden moles, a few other rodents have perfected the technique. And maybe elephant seals do it too. Most of us warm blooded types, however, rely on our voices and ears. And with elephants ears and voices being particularly well developed it had been generally assumed that they did too.

O’Connell, half a world away from lush Hawaii, watched the elephants in arid Etosha and questions came. Revolutionary ones. If planthoppers, moles (and Kevin Costner) could tune into seismic messages, why not elephants? The way they were behaving indicated that that might be happening – that the elephants were communicating with a distant herd – right in front of her nose. And what was going on with this toenail thing? The questions tantalized O’Connell.

She decided to find answers.

The results of her ten year quest are laid bare in her just published book “The Elephant’s Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa.”

It has drawn high acclaim from some of the most prestigious names in conservation science for several reasons.

Firstly as Mark Owens, author of the hauntingly beautiful book, “Cry of the Kalahari”, observes, it is a story of bravery and intellectual curiosity. Scientists with new ideas – particularly weird ones – must make tremendous efforts to accumulate sufficiently convincing evidence to persuade an extremely critical peer audience that they are correct.

Secondly, as Paul Erlich, author and the president of the Centre for Conservation Biology at Stanford University points out, O’Connell’s work has not just opened up a hitherto unknown world of elephant communication but has also illustrated that elephants, like great apes and humanity, have a highly developed sense of self.

Thirdly, and this is high praise indeed, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a conservationist (and author) who has lived, breathed and saved elephants for so long even an elephant might be excused for forgetting when he started, has stated that O’Connell has “taken her rightful place as one of the leading biographers of the African elephant.”

Personally I like this book because it is bulging with elephants. And equally importantly it is packed with fast moving adventure, all the more telling because it is true. O’Connell’s a tough cookie, and she needs to be. Working with elephants in Namibia involves working with their neighbours. And not all of O’Connell’s neighbours have been… what’s the word?

Neighbourly.

Yes that will do nicely. She’s had armed UNITA incursions from the Angolan civil war, lions who really wanted to eat her, elephants who took exception to her presence, local farmers and villagers who definitely didn’t like “the mother of all elephants” (their name for O’Connell), bureaucrats who didn’t particularly care for her, a poacher who had the effrontery to attach a WWF sticker on the door of his kraal (he was eventually shot by Botswana security forces, first in his knees and then in his elbows, dragged behind their vehicle before being shot in his head) and colleagues who were idiosyncratic. To say the least.

Working in wild and under-developed environments also posed its challenges. To take just one example, out of many, a lioness once went galloping off with her recording equipment.

But, as you will read, she stuck to her guns and pulled it off proving conclusively that elephants detect vibrations through their toenails and their fatty feet. These vibrations move upwards through their legs, shoulders and finally into the inner ear cavity. Furthermore they can communicate over distances of many miles, identify their callers and share information – such as the presence of lions – vital to their survival.

While in itself a fascinating discovery this information may have an extremely practical application in the form of reducing human/elephant conflict. The thousands of elephants that roam the north east of Namibia are wild in every sense of the word; they move where they please, unfettered by park fences. And often it pleases them to move into local people’s maize fields and help themselves. O’Connell has recorded alarm rumbles and played them through underground speakers deceiving the owners of the ‘listening’ toenails into thinking that other elephants are sending “Hey guys! Lions! Cease stuffing your faces with corn cobs! Split!”

It is proving a highly effective antidote to appetite!

The Elephant’s Secret Sense is published by Free Press a division of Simon and Schuster. For more information visit: www.simonsays.com

BRAIN WEIGHT FACTOIDs: The elephant’s brain is the largest of any land mammal. Average weight? 6,000 grams. Humans come second. Average weight? 1,350 grams And in third place we have the camel! 762 grams. Hot on its heels (or hump) is the giraffe (680), then lumbering along in fifth position is the hippo (582)

closely followed by horses (532), gorillas (500), polar bears(498) and this one is really surprising, cows come in at number nine with an average brain weight of 445, beating chimpanzees who limp home with only 420 grams of cranial contents. I know from discussions with South African crocodile researcher, Alison Lesley that Nile crocs are only packing a couple of grams but given the fact that they’ve outlasted the dinosaurs they are evidence that size doesn’t necessarily matter. Nobody’s weighed the brains of  African, or indeed, American President’s yet. But I’d suggest that anybody planning a study of this nature should familiarise themselves with micro-grams.

Brain shrinking and weight gain: Homer S has it all

In last week’s New Scientist, it was reported that a recent study has shown that people with higher BMI (Body Mass Index) have smaller brains (Do expanding waistlines cause shrinking brains? by Nora Schultz, p. 9, 22nd August 2009).

From initial scans, researchers found that from of a sample 94 elderly individuals, 51 overweight individuals had brains 6% smaller than those of normal weight. Another 14 obese participants had brains that were 8% smaller than those of normal weight. The worst hit areas are those involved with planning and memory.

Previous studies have shown the link between dementia and subsequent brain shrinkage. Diabetes is another condition that, with its high insulin levels can cause shrinking. Indeed the incidence of both these conditions increase with increased body weight. So could it be that what this study really saw was a by-product of dementia, diabetes and other brain-shrinking conditions, rather than a direct link with weight?

Apparently not. After researchers accounted for these conditions, the relationship between brain size and body weight remained the same indicating a clear and direct link between the two. What remains not clear is whether weight-gain is driving the shrinking of brains or the other way round.

Something of a chicken and egg scenario methinks. But somehow neither food is particular appealing to me at the moment, I kind of like my brain as it is…

From Denny: We all wonder just how did the human brain evolve and become larger. Who knows? We may still be evolving and developing larger brains? As always, it’s best to study our past to learn what might trend for our future.

It was 2.5 million years ago that our ancestors’ brains expanded in size. BTW, it also coincided with an ice age. Hmmm…? Scientists wonder if there was a connection.

Did you know the modern human brain is a real energy glutton? C’mon, you feel hungry after spending a lot of time on the computer, don’t you? I sure do; I know my brain is actually the hungry guy. Turns out that the brain accounts for almost half of our resting metabolic rate! Whew!

A decade old hypothesis by biologists David Schwartzman and George Middendorf of Howard University in Washington, D.C. suggests that our modern brain could not have evolved until that 2.5 million years ago ice age. Why? Their idea is that “such a large brain would have generated heat faster than it could dissipate it in the warmer climate of earlier times.” Problem is that they couldn’t prove it back then.

Apparently, a Climate researcher, Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany has been doing some research that could help prove the ice age-larger brain connection.

It does make you wonder if the ice age brought a bigger brain does this warmer climate change bring a smaller brain? Hmmm… back to stupid is as stupid does?

To find out and read the rest of their article, go here.

This termite fishing qualifies as “tool use” because the chimps use an object to alter the condition of something else. Sounds simple, but it’s kind of tricky. Ya see, lots of animals use objects they find in their environment to get food, but it doesn’t always count as “tool use.”

Huh?

Exactly. Here’s the deal: if an animal throws a rock at its food—as Egyptian vultures do to crack open ostrich eggs—then it counts as tool use. BUT, if an animal throws its food at a rock—as bearded vultures and golden hawks do with tortoises—it does not.

That distinction might seem a little nitpicky, but it’s backed by hard science. Researchers found that the part of the brain* responsible for the ability to use tools is actually bigger in animals that use tools than it is in those that are just borderline users (e.g. those that bash their food against something hard).

Case in point: one of the best tool users around has one of the biggest brains relative to its weight—the crow. Most members of the crow family (family Corvidae) are what some would call “downright clever” (and what we call “freaking smart”). When a crow was given food that wasn’t up to snuff, it took matters into its own…umm…hands. A researcher had forgotten to wet the corn meal before feeding it to one of the crows in the lab. Instead of choking down the dry corn meal, the crow used a random cup in its cage to fetch water from its water spigot in order to prep its own meal. (According to the researchers, the cup was only in the cage as a random object and had never held water before.)

A more recent example involves a study of rooks (a close relative of crows and magpies). The birds not only knew which tools were right for a job, but figured out how to use multiple tools in sequence. In the experiment, the birds were presented with a tube leading to a trapdoor that held a tasty worm. By dropping a stone down the tube, the birds opened the trap door and out dropped the worm. When presented with a wide-mouthed tube, the birds chose the largest stone available—they were offered three different sized stones. But, when the tube was narrower, the birds went right for the smallest stone, which was the only one that would fit down the neck of the tube. (Check out the video here.)

Now comes the freaking smart part. The rooks were presented with two tubes, a narrow one holding a worm and a wide one holding a small stone. The birds dropped a large stone down the wide tube, releasing the small stone. Then, they picked up the small stone and dropped it down the narrow tube, releasing the worm. In a separate set of trials, the rooks were given a wire instead of a set of stones. On their very first try, they figured out that they needed to bend the wire into a hook to get the worm at the bottom of the tube. For the record, the birds had never been taught to bend the wire. (Check out that video here.)

Screw the early bird. Clearly, it’s the tool user that gets the worm.

* In mammals, the neocortex is the hotspot for tool use (and sensory perception, spatial reasoning and parts of short-term memory). Birds have a different brain structure, and the important regions are called the mesopallium and a midopallium, in case you were wondering.

As we age, certain areas of the brain become thinner, these are mainly in parts of the cortex.  These areas deal primarily with attention span and the senses.  As we get older, the thinning produces unwanted effects in all of us such as dulled senses and decreased attention span.  However, if this research is correct, people that meditate can not only reverse this process, but they can strengthen and increase the size of their brains.

This is exciting research indeed as it is shows scientifically that meditation can improve your overall well being by directly stimulating your brain.  Similar research into the effects of music and juggling have shown that these activities also helped stimulate growth in the thickness of the brain in related areas.

Further studies are currently underway to provide greater evidence of the changes induced by meditation.  This research should reveal more about how the thickening of the brain helps us as we get older.

So, meditation won’t only provide you with physical stillness and a mental quietness, it may also help you maintain your mental sharpness for much longer If that sounds like something you want to experience, then take the fast track to meditation with our meditation machines.

— Ivor Murray is the MD of Meditations-UK, an innovative company that sells technology-led aids to help you relax and de-stress. Their main products are Meditation Machines – small, portable machines that use natural light and sound to gently guide you into calm, relaxing states of mind and body, easily and automatically.

You can find out more about them at www.Meditations-UK.com or www.MindSpa-UK.com, or telephone 020 8371 0436