BREAKING NEWS: T.rex had baboon-like numbers of neurons in the telencephalon!

What are different brains made of, and what does it matter?

Suzana Herculano-Houzel is a Brazilian-born neuroscientist currently working as an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University, where her lab investigates the extent and limitations of brain diversity, how brain diversity arose in evolution, and what difference it makes that brains are different. Currently, her main interest is the intersection between brain metabolism, growth, development, sleep, cognition, and lifespan.

Discoveries

  • The human brain has 86 billion neurons and just as many non-neuronal cells, which makes it just a scaled-up primate brain
  • Birds have (tiny) neurons galore in their brains and cognition to match
  • Cortical expansion in evolution is NOT a simple addition of columns of similar numbers of neurons, and more like jam-on-toast
  • The degree of cortical folding is pure physics, regardless of the numbers of neurons composing the cortex (and the cerebellum is just the same!)
  • Maximal lifespan is a function of numbers of cortical neurons, not body mass
  • Energy supply per neuron is competitive and depends on local neuronal density
  • ​Brain energetics is supply-limited, not demand-based

Body size is... mostly irrelevant

The mainstream literature still normalizes everything to body mass, as if the size of the body really determined anything. It never was more than a correlation - and a poor one, at that. Check out the lab's discoveries on what really matters: numbers of neurons.
Are dogs conscious? Smarter than cats, at least? How did the human brain come to be? Here's a 4.7 star listen to ten Big Questions of Neuroscience, answered by Suzana Herculano-Houzel.

Contact Suzana Herculano-Houzel
email: suzana [dot] herculano [at] vanderbilt [dot] edu
Office: +1 615 875 9086
​twitter: @suzanahh
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