At Mind Matters News: Can science really engineer a bigger human brain?

Computational neuroscientist Daniel Graham wonders why we would bother. There is no strict relationship between brain size and intellectual achievement:

In a three-part series at Psychology Today, Smith College computational neuroscientist Daniel Graham, author of An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works (2021), tackles that question:

First, most parts of the human brain are already larger than they should be for an animal life form of our size. But the difference is hardly commensurate with average human intelligence vs. average chimpanzee intelligence…

Meanwhile, there’s also the fact that many humans get by — in human society — with a split brain or only half a brain. As Graham notes, Albert Einstein’s brain, as such, was not unusual.

Second, the human brain has been shrinking …

News, “Can science really engineer a bigger human brain?” at Mind Matters News

Studies with guppies did not show that breeding bigger brains consistently led to smarter guppies, he says.

Takehome: The human brain has actually been shrinking in the last 30,000 years, the same period that has also shown great intellectual achievements.

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and

Do larger brains make us human? Is that all? Brain organoid studies suggest a “key genetic switch” that makes human brains grow larger than ape brains. Some researchers believe that our diet led to a larger brain but they differ as to which food was the ultimate brain booster. Are we missing something here?

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