I am a little disappointed to find no comparison to the dolphin brain in the talk about the number of neurons! Why elephant? If it was about the size it could have been the animal with the largest brain out there (which happens to be a cetacean, like dolphins)!
The comparison to elephants was made to illustrate the fact that number of neurons isn't closely correlated with brain size. Seemed like a reasonable point of comparison to me.
I like this quote: A few years later, the anthropologist Richard Wrangham built on this idea, arguing that the invention of cooking was crucial to human brain evolution. Soft, cooked foods are much easier to digest than tough raw ones, yielding more calories for less gastrointestinal work.
So along that line, the massive recent increase in high-sugar food/drinks and fast-food restaurants like McDonald's should be fueling another leap in brain size!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] threadhttp://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_...
Which is especially important because the article takes as given that the number of cortical neurons is what makes humans special.
So along that line, the massive recent increase in high-sugar food/drinks and fast-food restaurants like McDonald's should be fueling another leap in brain size!