The emphasis on neural connections, however, made me wonder what to do with animals with brains larger than our 1.35-kilogram brain. What about the dolphin’s 1.5-kilogram brain, the elephant’s 4-kilogram brain, and the sperm whale’s 8-kilogram brain? Are these animals perhaps more conscious than we are? Or does it depend on the number of neurons? In this regard, the picture is less clear. It was long thought that our brain contained more neurons than any other on the planet, regardless of its size, but we now know that the elephant brain has three times as many neurons—257 billion, to be
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