• Question: can you tell how clever you are by your brain size

    Asked by nrtyx to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Ollie Russell

      Ollie Russell answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Im afraid not. Everybodys brain is pretty much the same size as everyone elses, yet everyone has a different level of intelligence.

      However, Humans do have the biggest brains on Earth and we are also the most intelligent animal. When you compare the different brains of aniamls, it is generally true that the bigger the brain, the cleverer the animal.

    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      hello 🙂

      this is a good question. Generally speaking brain size matches body size, and elephant as a much bigger brain than a human but humans are more intelligent. Our brains are more complicated and are highly folded (more folded than an elephants), this means that we can have higher brain functions which need more tissue but fit it into a much smaller head. if our brains weren’t so folded they would be huge, and our heads would have to be bigger too!!

      But as to whether you can tell different humans IQ by looking at brain size, you can’t. the brain isroughly the same size in everyone 😀

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Hi nrtyx. I have seen studies have reported correlations between brain volume and some measures of intelligence. Others have looked and not found anything. Correlations range from 0 to 0.6. Correlation is a measure of how related two variables are, and ranges from -1 to +1. 0 means no relationship at all, and the closer you get to 1, the more the two traits will be positively related. Without looking in more detail at the original papers (which I am going to do now, cheers!) I can’t say for sure one way or the other, but it’s still something that people are looking at.

      This is a controversial issue, not least because it raises the ghost of eugenics. One of Darwin’s cousins, Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” from the greek meaning “well-born”. He thought he could increase the overall intelligence of the British people by selective breeding. Unfortunately, his ideas were influential in some quarters, and contributed towards mass sterilisation programs of “undesirable” people in the early 1900s in the America and Europe, and may have indirectly influenced Hilter’s idea of a “master race”.

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