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Comment by voxelghost | Hacker News Reader

The African elephant has about 3 times (2.57×10^11) as many neurons than the average human (8.6×10^10). The pilot whale (1.28×10^11).

Perhaps they see the bigger picture, and realize that everything humans are doing is pretty meaningless.

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For sure you won't see them write heavy tomes about new kinds of science...

Hmmm...

It was black coffee; no adulterants. Might work.

Are keyboards dishwasher-proof?

Maybe if we had stopped where the elephants are, we would feel happier, we'd never know. Not enough neurons unfortunately.

I've read around that the overwhelming majority is used to balance / movement and perception. For us, I think we've a pretty nice balance in terms of structure and how much effort is required to control it.

> I've read around that the overwhelming majority is used to balance / movement and perception.

Just like humans. /s

European Neanderthals probably had 15% more neurons than modern Homo Sapiens, based on brain volume.

We're still here, so bigger brains alone might not be the reason.

Imagine packing 50,000 elephants inside a football stadium.

Humans have a unique ability to scale up a network of brains without complete hell breaking lose.

Although 50,000 humans inside a football stadium are not 50,000 times smarter than a single human. Indeed taken as a single entity, its intelligence is probably less than the average person. Collective intelligence likely peaks in the single digit number of coordinators and drops off steeply beyond a few dozen.

If anything mobs are dumber than any one person in the mob.

Are you comparing 50k elephants with hell? I bet our "ability to scale up a network of brains" is infinitely more dangerous than that.

If I am not mistaken hasn't there been studies that show intelligence more about brain wrinkles than volume? Hence the memes about smooth brains (implying someone is dumb).

This is how I understood it also.

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