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The human body allocates 20-25% of its total resting metabolic rate to the brain, compared with 8-10% in other primates and a mere 3-5% in other mammals.
Thus we view the brain as a rather energy-hungry supercomputer.
This analogy with an electrical computer is a good one. The greater a computer's capacity, the more electrical power is required to keep it running, and the larger the electrical supply cables need to be.
It is the same with the brain. The higher the cognitive function, the higher the metabolic rate, the greater the blood flow and the larger the arteries.
The evolution of the human brain is unique among animals. We have looked at the size of the carotid arteries in 34 species of living primates that represent evolution toward the great apes and hominins.
Among these representatives of primate evolution, both body size and brain size increased, but body size increased faster. The blood flow to primate brains increased roughly in proportion to brain size. Only in the hominins do we see that blood flow increased faster than brain size, which indicates that the brain was not only developing in size, but in usage as well. And that shows our ancestors were getting smarter.
Would routing a firehose directly from our heart to our brain make us smarter, then?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @01:01AM (1 child)
I used to work with a very clever and very productive owner of a small company. At about age 75 he was told that he had a lot of plaque in his carotid artery and needed surgery to clean it out. All of the people that worked with him noticed that he had been slowing down, memory lapses, the usual things that are often associated with aging.
After the operation, his surgeon told him that his artery also had a kink which was restricting the blood flow. The surgeon was able to straighten out the kink and announced that he would be getting 30% more flow than he had ever had. He lasted to 94, and if anything was considerably sharper, more creative and more active until very near the end of his life.
Just one data point, but an interesting one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @10:43AM
Kinks in arteries might not be good, but mild twists could be helpful: http://www.scotsman.com/news/revealed-new-twist-to-clogged-arteries-1-1292406 [scotsman.com]
http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/news_and_events/news/news_view.asp?newsid=3188 [mmu.ac.uk]