• Question: does a bigger brain make you smarter?

    Asked by Au to Ria, Rachel, Joe, Iroise, Adrian on 8 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by isla, Dan.
    • Photo: Iroise Dumontheil

      Iroise Dumontheil answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Across species, that’s generally true, although it’s a bigger brain relative to your body size. That’s what’s important, because bigger animals have bigger brains.
      Within a species, that’s more controversial, because in some cases people have found that having a thinner cortex (the surface of the brain) in some brain areas may be associated with being better at some things. In fact the cortex is thicker at around puberty than it is during adulthood.
      There are some interesting studies showing that brain size (relative to body size) is correlated with the size of our social group, and researchers have argued that is it the evolutionary pressure of being able to cope with a large social group that has led to larger brains (for examples in dogs, which are social vs. cats, and in humans). This is because we have to remember who is the boss of the social group, who has been nice to us before, who hasn’t, etc.

    • Photo: Adrian Chu

      Adrian Chu answered on 9 Nov 2016:

      I’ll leave the details to the neuroscientists here. However, one must first define what “smart” means, as well as how you measure it in other animals. Also human don’t actually use 100% of your brain’s capacity, so I’m not sure why having a bigger brain necessarily relates to increased usage of its full potential~

    • Photo: Rachel Harris

      Rachel Harris answered on 10 Nov 2016:

      You can’t tell much about a person by just looking at their brain.

      There seems to be a connection between brain size and intelligence in humans, but it’s not a very strong link. This means there are likely many other factors that influence intelligence. These factors include the number of connections between the nerve cells (synapses) in the brain and the way that nerve cells process glucose to make energy.

Comments