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

dkomo wrote:
Tim Tyler wrote:
dkomo wrote:

?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?

[...]

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.

Dolphins, whales and elephants all seem highly intelligent to me.

However, it is classically thought that you have to adjust
brain size for body size to some extent - when considering the
effect of brain size on intelligence - since so much of the
brain is devoted to sensory-motor processing.
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