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Longevity and sexual maturity vary across species with number of cortical neurons, and humans are no exception

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Suzana Herculano-Houzel, P.I. (her.kou.LAH.no.who.ZELL) is Associate Professor of the Departments of Psychology and Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University since 2016. She was previously an Associate Professor at Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, between 2002-2016.

She majored in Biology at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (1992), holds an M.Sc. in Neuroscience (Case Western Reserve University, 1995, with Story Landis), and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience (Université Paris VI, 1999, with Yves Frégnac and Max-Planck-Institut for Brain Research, with Wolf Singer). In Brazil, she was a Scientist with the National Research Council (CNPq) from 2007 to 2016; Young Scientist of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ, 2007-2009) and Scientist of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) between 2009 and 2016. In 2010, she was a recipient of the Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition, James S. McDonell Foundation.

She is the author of six books (in Portuguese) for the general public on the neuroscience of everyday life, with over 80,000 copies sold, was the writer and presenter of the TV series Neurológica (Fantástico, Rede Globo de Televisão) between 2008 and 2011, and remains a regular writer for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo since 2006.

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Associate Professor of Psychology

The human brain is puzzling -- it is curiously large given the size of our bodies, uses a tremendous amount of energy for its weight and has a bizarrely dense cerebral cortex. But: why? Neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel puts on her detective's cap and leads us through this mystery. By making "brain soup," she arrives at a startling conclusion.

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Watch Vanderbilt researcher Suzana Herculano-Houzel explain her latest research on bird brains.  The first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in the brains of birds has found that they have significantly more neurons packed into their small brains than are stuffed into mammalian and even primate brains of the same mass.
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Watch: Study gives new meaning to the term “bird brain”

There’s a new twist to the perennial argument about which is smarter, cats or dogs.

It has to do with their brains, specifically the number of neurons in their cerebral cortex:  the ‘little grey cells’ associated with thinking, planning and complex behavior --- all considered hallmarks of intelligence.

The first study to actually count the number of cortical neurons in the brains of a number of carnivores, including cats and dogs, has found that dogs possess significantly more of them than cats. 

“In this study, we were interested in comparing different species of carnivorans to see how the numbers of neurons in their brains relate to the size of their brains, including a few favorite species including cats and dogs, lions and brown bears,” said Associate Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who developed the method for accurately measuring the number of neurons in brains.

(Carnivora is a diverse order that consists of 280 species of mammals all of which have teeth and claws that allow them to eat other animals.)

The results of the study are described in a paper titled “Dogs have the most neurons, though not the largest brain: Trade-off between body mass and number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of large carnivoran species” accepted for publication in the open access journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy. 

As far as dogs and cats go, the study found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons while cats have about 250 million. (That compares to 16 billion in the human brain.)

“I believe the absolute number of neurons an animal has, especially in the cerebral cortex, determines the richness of their internal mental state and their ability to predict what is about to happen in their environment based on past experience,” Herculano-Houzel explained.

“I’m 100 percent a dog person,” she added, “but, with that disclaimer, our findings mean to me that dogs have the biological capability of doing much more complex and flexible things with their lives than cats can. At the least, we now have some biology that people can factor into their discussions about who's smarter, cats or dogs.”

The study was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation; the Schapiro Undergraduate Research Fund at Randolph-Macon College; the Vice Deanship of Research Chairs at the King Saud University; the National Research Foundation of South Africa; and Brazilian crowdfunding contributors.

Read more: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/11/29/grumpy-cat-study-dogs/


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Watch: Sorry Grumpy Cat, study finds dogs are brainier than cats

“People need to drop the idea that the human brain is exceptional,” said Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel. “Our brain is basically a primate brain. Because it is the largest primate brain, it does have one distinctive feature: It has the highest number of cortical neurons of any primate. Humans have 16 billion compared with 9 billion in gorillas and orangutans and six-to-seven billion in chimpanzees. It is remarkable, but it is not exceptional.”
 
In her popular science book The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable (MIT Press: March 2016), Herculano-Houzel explains how human brains grew so large, even larger than the brains of gorillas and orangutans, whose bodies are larger than ours. Her answer is surprisingly simple. It is the invention of cooking.
 
“Our big brains are very costly. They use 25 percent of all the energy the body needs each day,” Herculano-Houzel said. “Cooking allowed us to overcome an energetic barrier that restricts the size of the brains of other primates.”
 
Take the case of the gorilla. It must spend at least eight hours per day foraging and eating to support its body and brain. The human brain is three times larger than that of the gorilla. If a gorilla had a brain the size of a human, it would have to spend an additional one and a half hours a day finding food. So there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for the gorilla to support a bigger brain. Likewise, if humans ate like any other primate, we would have to spend nine and a half hours per day eating – every single day.
 
That’s where cooking comes in. “By cooking, I mean cutting, dicing, smashing –all types of food preparation,” Herculano-Houzel said.
“Take a single carrot. If you eat it raw, it will take 10 to 15 minutes of vigorous chewing and your digestive system will only capture about one third of the calories. But, if you cut the carrot up and cook it for a few minutes, it takes only a few minutes to consume and your body gets 100 percent of the calories.”
 
The origin of cooking, as Herculano-Houzel defines it, dates back about 2.5 million years ago with the development of the first stone tools. Among other things, these stone tools were man’s first food processors, allowing our ancestors to slice and dice and mash their food. Evidence for the controlled use of fire appears about 400,000 years ago.
 
“Those early tool makers had brains about the same size as gorillas. But, beginning about 1.8 million years ago, the brains of our ancestors began growing steadily, tripling in size over the next 1.5 million years,” said Herculano-Houzel.
 
“It’s amazing that something we now take for granted, cooking, was such a transformational technology which gave us the big brains that have made us the only species to study ourselves and to generate knowledge that transcends what was observed firsthand; to tamper with itself, fixing imperfections with the likes of glasses, implants and surgery and thus changing the odds of natural selection; and to modify its environment so extensively (for better and for worse), extending its habitat to improbable locations.”

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Watch: The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable

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