I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
This is a great question, but the answer is pretty complicated!
Researchers say that a bigger brain in humans, is related to intelligence! But, we know that the male brain is larger than the female brain, because men are often larger than women, but not always smarter! This is because our brains are wired differently!
I’m not sure whether the use of the brain is important for the control of all the functions of the body, but I dd read that very large animals with large brains are often less intelligent than some smaller animals, so maybe it’s true!
It seems like brain function is determined by the effectiveness of the wiring and circuits, more than size!
Maybe the others haven better idea!! 🙂
0
The brain is like a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) – it has executive control over important functions in your body. It’s important to know that actually some functions can occur without the brain’s control (what we call reflexes). These functions can bypass the CPU/brain and be processed either in the spinal cord or within groups of nerve cells “ganglia” which run like two parallel lines along your back and branch out to difference organs. These ganglia make up your autonomic nervous system (ANS) and are divided into two further branches which control function in organs such as your heart, lungs, liver and digestive tract.
Brain size has been studied for a long time for difference reasons, and as Hannah points out some scientists thought that a bigger brain = more intelligence. It’s not so clear. The connections between regions in the brain may also help to make the brain work more efficiently, which may influence the overall size slightly but this increase in efficiency/wiring/communication is NOT caused by a bigger brain!
0
Hannah is right about wiring…. the way our brains are connected are very important for how much our brains can do.
The size of our brains do matter. Over a long long time, brain size has increased quite a lot from our early hominid ancestors living in caves to our brains today. We know we are able to do more than our early ancestors. Also, we can look at the brain sizes of mice vs us and there is a HUGE difference. Have a look at this picture https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Brain_size You might not be able to see the mouse brain very well but it doesn’t have any folds and wrinkles in it. Human brains do. This is a clever way of fitting more brain into our skulls. If we were to unfold our brains they would probably pop out of our heads! Dolphins brains are the most folded and wrinkled…. I wonder what that says about how smart they are?
When it comes to comparing you and your classmates brain sizes I don’t think we would find a big difference and most certainly no correlation with brain size and intelligence. Its about how you use your brain and the connections you can make and break.
0
Everyone else has answered this well. But I’ll just add in a story… There was a researcher in the 1800’s that was convinced that brain size was everything. He really liked to claim that smaller brains were the reason that females were inferior to males. When he died, they took his brain out and weighed it….and his brain was even smaller than the females that he was calling “inferior”!
snort. Inferiority complex.
0
The ladies are all over this question, and have answered this very well 😀
Bottom line, bigger doesn’t always mean better…
0