Is the Human Brain Special?

I recently watched a TED talk about why the human brain is superior to every other living thing’s brain. “100 billion neurons” is a popular number to throw around concerning to amount of cells in our brain. In fact, I believe I have used this number in previous posts and papers for school-a testament to learning new things, I guess. However, the speaker in this TED talk, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, developed a new way to count the neurons in the human brain. As she explains, we can turn the brain into a soup of sorts, dissolve the cell membrane and leaving the nuclei in tact, shake up the ‘soup’ to evenly distribute the nuclei, and then simply count the number of nuclei. Using this method she developed, Herculano-Houzel shrunk the long-standing 100 billion number by 14 billion, reaching a number of 86 billion neurons.

So now that an accurate number of neurons is established, Herculano-Houzel continues to answer the question in the title. She compared the brains of multiple species. One thing that was found was that rodent brains grows larger faster than it gains neurons. The opposite is true in primates. Furthermore, it seems that if all brains were made the same way, then we would have to be proportionally much larger. But they are not, so we are not the size of whales. So it seems that the only reason we have special cognitive abilities is that we have a gigantic number of neurons, especially in the cerebral cortex.

But why are other primates not the same? It comes down to energy. Energy is nature’s currency and a neuron is expensive. Primates eat raw food which is fairly obvious and most spend a long time finding and eating it. Primates are also generally large and therefore have a large need for their body too. Simply, put they cannot afford to have a brain the size of ours. They would essentially have to spend dawn till dusk eating. We, on the other had, have cooked food. It allows use to more efficiently obtain energy.

So that is why we are capable of these things. Simply put we have the most neurons and eat the most effeciently. Survival of the fittest, I guess.