Monday, 3 November 2014

Hierarchy of sciences - 4, Biology and human brain

What is the difference between human brain and an animal brain? I think the most exciting thing about human brain which no other creature is able to do is the ability to deduce or bring reasons. Although there are many other things which scientists think are the difference too, like appreciation of beauty, self-consciousness, morality, understanding of time, love and ... but I don't think animals really have no idea of what these things are. They may barely understand the above-mentioned things like self-consciousness or love, but I'm not sure if we make an accurate measurement system for these definitions we find them zero in animals. We also have to notice the definition itself, what is beauty? We enjoy looking at an art masterpiece, but don't you think a wild animal itself doesn't have more desire to foods that smells better? Doesn't it appreciation?



Again, why something like love happens in a human which may not happen or if happens is not that much like human love in animals. The following is my idea of the reason, I first simply describe it then we check to see if we can explain it with physics or not?

We see many animals have a social life like monkeys, bats, ants, bees and ... What is the difference we see in human social life and these animals. If you ask me, if you consider the size and complexity of human brain with these animals, there is no difference at all. They all try to socialize at best their brains let them do. They take care of children, somehow divide duties and ... even some of these animals respect to their relationship with their mates. In fact, if you study you'll find that human brain cells, brain molecules, neurotransmitters and synapses are almost identical in all animals too.

Human brain has been evolved from 300-400gr billion years ago to what today is about 1,400gr. Although the size or mass of the brain is not the only superiority for the human brain, but it is a factor. There is also a factor of brain size to body size which highly affects the intelligence.

There are also other parameters which make human brain works better than an animal, and one of them is the number of neurons in cerebral cortex which is about 21 billion for human while the nearest animal's count is 11 billion which is for some kind of African elephant. (The total neurons for human is about 86 billion)

I don't want to get involved the exact reasoning because I don't have enough information and knowledge but what I see is that we still can easily describe why human is more intelligent that animals just by laws of physics. Can't we? Just consider it as a high-performance computer with many CPUs and huge memory size vs simple notebook. And remember how our simple organism in the last post learned to come to the near of the ocean surface for sunlight and consider having a huge brain to learn during the time.