Re: Animal "laser beam" vs. human "floodlight" intelligence

Tim Tyler wrote:

dkomo wrote:


The 4 aspects of 'humaniqueness' that differentiate human and animal thought

http://www.topnews.in/4-aspects-humaniqueness-differentiate-human-and-animal-thought-221184

Washington, Feb 18: A new study at Harvard University has shed light on
the key differences in human and animal cognition.

Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, biological anthropology, and
organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard?s Faculty of Arts and
Sciences proposed four key differences in human and animal cognition.

?Animals share many of the building blocks that comprise human thought,
but paradoxically, there is a great cognitive gap between humans and
animals,? said Hauser.


Not much of a paradox: human brains are gynormous compared to those
of most animals - especially compared to animals of a similar size.

Did you mean "enormous" instead of "gynormous"? If so, perhaps you'd
care to explain why dolphins, whales and elephants, whose brains are
larger than ours, aren't more intelligent than we are?

Along the same lines in the "size matters" category, I attempted the
following analogy in another newsgroup in response to a comment made
that there is no great gulf between animal brains and human brains:

"Analogously there is no great gulf between the Intel 8080 which came
out in 1976 and the latest Pentium Core 2 Duo processor. After all,
they are both constructed from MOS transistors, and contain many similar
circuits like registers, multiplexors and instruction decoders. It's
just that the later has three orders of magnitude greater processing
power than the former."

To push the "size matters" analogy further, the feature sizes of the
transistors on the Pentium are much smaller than those of the 8080.
This allows enormously more transistors to be packed onto a chip, which
allows wider data paths and a much greater amount of pipelining and
parallelism, leading to the increased processing power.

In brains, it is not feature sizes but volumes that count. Greater
volumes allow for more neurons, but connectivity increases much faster,
as the square of the number of neurons. So emerges capabilities of
thinking in humans that go far beyond what most animals are capable of.

None of this, however, explains the relative dimwittedness of dolphins,
whales and elephants.


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx




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