Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Number?

...

Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Count? ... Scott Alexander Mar 07, 2025 291 214 22 Share Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain. Different animals’ intelligence levels track the number of neurons in their cerebral cortices (cerebellum etc don’t count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, “ encephalization quotient ”, etc. This is most obvious in certain bird species that have tiny brains full of tiny neurons and are very smart (eg crows, parrots). Humans wit

related reading

• Neurons And Intelligence: A Birdbrained Perspectiveslatestarcodex.com
• What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds beyond Ours-Stephen Wolfram Writingswritings.stephenwolfram.com
• Why aren't smart people happier? - by Adam Mastroianniexperimental-history.com
• [1911.01547] On the Measure of Intelligencearxiv.org
• Attention is all we havedavidbessis.substack.com
• Neural networks are not already cleanlesswrong.com
• Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is whytheintrinsicperspective.com
• The Algernon Argument · Gwern.netgwern.net
• What is intelligence?theoriesofintelligence.substack.com
• So how does learning work?cs.mcgill.ca
• Human-like Neural Nets by Catapulting · Gwern.netgwern.net
• How Computationally Complex Is a Single Neuron? | Quanta Magazinequantamagazine.org