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    • CommentAuthorKosmopolit
    • CommentTimeNov 17th 2009
    Pretty interesting: intelligence - or some aspects of it anyway- may require far fewer neurons than we assume - which has soem pretty obvious and dramatic implications for AI.

    What percentage of the 85 billion neurons in a human brain are their for muscle control, image and sound processing or are just there to provide built-in redundancy?

    We may be far closer to self-aware AI than we realise.

    "Animals with bigger brains are not necessarily more intelligent," according to Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary's Research Centre for Psychology and University of Cambridge colleague, Jeremy Niven. This begs the important question: what are they for?



    Differences in brain size between animals is extreme: a whale's brain can weigh up to 9 kg (with over 200 billion nerve cells), and human brains vary between 1.25 kg and 1.45 kg (with an estimated 85 billion nerve cells). A honeybee's brain weighs only 1 milligram and contains fewer than a million nerve cells.




    • CommentTimeNov 17th 2009
    The old chestnut in Primatology 150 about brain size was Anatole France had an 1000 cc brain case versus Albert Einstein's 2000 cc capacity. Gray matter, folds, and neural connections seem to matter more.
  1.  (7240.3)
    Just finished reading The Red Queen which is about Evolution and Sex and it has rather a lot in it about why we might have evoled language and the like and why we think of ourselves as 'intelligent'. Unfortunatley that's all I've got, my capacity for holding information in memory that isn't visual is pretty weak, I'll have to go back over it and find some specific stuff. Needless to say it was interesting. ;)
    • CommentTimeNov 18th 2009 edited
    @Kosmo - mind posting the link

    EDIT: Found it!
    • CommentTimeNov 18th 2009 edited
    This is amazing if it is true, but is open to question. Most of all I am curious about how they use a computer model to simulate how many neurons would be required for consciousness. That seems a wee bit far fetched, given that we have no idea how consciousness works, what it is, or how to even define/limit it. (or rather there are many definitions and debates on the issue) this study concludes (in some ways) the opposite - i.e. bigger brains are more intelligent. Now this second one is from 2007, so may be dated, but nonetheless, I am skeptical without more information.

    EDIT: Yes the two are not fundamentally exclusive, and are looking at marginally different things, but it seems they do reach mutually inconsistent findings.
  2.  (7240.6)
    Let's not forget just how little brain matter, in extremis, is needed to run a (low IQ but functional) human...

    (Subject pics on left, neurotypical example on right.)








    Of course, whether this means it'll be easier to make an AI or that our basic neuro theory is very wrong remains to be seen...
    • CommentTimeNov 18th 2009
    @Cat holy crap! that is insane... or not, as the case may be.

    Thanks for that, hadn't seen that one before.
  3.  (7240.8)
    In other news, a local area ant considers herself to be very intelligent.
    She bases that on the size of the ant colony she belongs to.
  4.  (7240.9)
    ...44-year-old civil servant...
    ...“The images were most unusual… the brain was virtually absent,” he said...

    I'm pretty sure this isn't really all that unusual with civil servants.