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Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

Why would relative brain size matter? If your brain were 75 percent of your mass but only consists of 1000 neurons, why would that be predictive of high intelligence over a brain that is 1% of mass, but 10 billion neurons? It has always seemed more intuitive to me that absolute brain size would matter far more.

Also...brain size might be a decent proxy, but there is a large amount of variation in nature for distribution of neurons. Your brain is a centralized cluster, but we have neurons all throughout our bodies too. With octopuses, neurons are far more heavily concentrated in the tentacles than mammals, and they certainly show extremely high intelligence.

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I've assumed it's because a larger body, with more cells, needs more neurons to monitor and model it, but it's not compelling.

The "law" is mere empirical correlation - e.g. you are smarter than a blue whale.

The fantasy that the baby spiders with encephalization quotients (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient) off the charts (because their brains displace their digestive systems and partly fill their legs) are more intelligent than humans, appeals to me. I suspect raw intelligence doesn't require many neurons. But spiders aren't social.

Parrots are.

That's interesting

I've always felt spiders are different from other bugs. The way they move feels more calculated

Always wondered why spiders have their own phobia defined. I have probably a mild form of arachnophobia, they just give me creeps especially when moving.

Your comment makes me wonder if it is indeed related to their relative intelligence to other insects.

They are different. Most “bugs” people see are insects. Spiders are not insects.

Lots of spiders spins webs. This requires very careful stepping, so you are quite correct, their movements are very calculated. They have to step on a high wire, possibly vertically, while avoiding the sticky parts, getting knocked off, hit by prey, etc

If your brain were 75 percent of your mass but only contained 1000 neurons, then you would probably be the smartest sort of whatever tiny, simple organism you happen to be.

Maybe. I feel like there are probably a lot of uses for neurons which don't have that much to do with cleverness

That sounds plausible to me. I don't have a definition of "cleverness"/"intelligence", but I could believe that in many species most of the neurons are working on processing sensory data or controlling muscles, which isn't the essence of (human) intelligence: you do call a juggler "clever", but a human who is blind and mostly paralysed isn't less "intelligent".

I think it has been suggested that the "intelligence" of octopuses might be a side-effect of the huge amount of data processing that is required to control a body without a skeleton.

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