Evolution of the human brain: when bigger is better

[ai_vin]

The article's conclusion is that increasing brain size hits rapidly diminishing returns beyond a doubling of capacity. This has serious implications for the Highbrows, who apparently have a brain ten times the normal size!

To be fair to AI Vin, he does specify that the Highbrow brain isn't structured in exactly the same way as the standard human brain, with an extra layer of the cerebral cortex folding over the two hemispheres.

Nonetheless, his design still runs into the same latency issues that would occur in real life. Large parts of the Highbrow brain are located in the abdomen, which would massively increase communications lag between different parts of the brain and diminish the benefits of all that extra neural tissue.

Guys, I did consider the latency issue when I did the Highbrows. In the article there is this line: This enlarged neural network needs an expanded capacity for data traffic control and to do this an extension of the cerebellum has wrapped itself around the spinal cord and continued to grow down the enlarged vertebral canal. From there it can link up with and manage the workings of the grey matter in the vertebral tube.

Not knowing a lot about how the brain works I left a lot of the details to the imagination but I figure the extension of the cerebellum in the spinal cord could handle latency by speeding up some signals and slowing others.