| Title | How Our Species Got Smarter: Through a Rush of Blood to the Head | |
| Date | Sunday March 26 2017, @12:01AM | |
| Author | mrpg | |
| Topic | ||
| from the that-explains-my-thinness dept. | ||
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?
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printed from SoylentNews, How Our Species Got Smarter: Through a Rush of Blood to the Head on 2024-04-25 09:44:00