What is the most peculiar thing about the human brain?
11.06.2025 06:54
It’s hard to understand why we need such big brains to accomplish the things we do.
Lots of mammals get by with tiny brains. Mice having just 71 million neurons can do all the things they need to do to survive.
Our brains have 86 billion neurons. Insects manage complicated lives with microscopic brains. Fruit fly brains, for example, have fewer than 200,000 neurons. That’s enough for them to analyze information from their senses, find food and mates, avoid predators, walk, communicate, etc. Fruit flies can navigate in the air, avoiding the many obstacles in their environment and responding to air currents and rain. Human pilots require lots of training to do that.
The mystery becomes even greater when you think about the limitations of our brains. Computer scientists use bits per second to measure the rate at which a computer can handle information. An ordinary USB bus on a laptop computer can handle 30 megabits per second. In contrast, Human beings can understand speech or read text at 45 bits per second or less.
You might claim that we need gigantic brains for language but songbirds with tiny brains have some of the basic elements of language. The brain of a Blackcap Chickadee, for example, weighs less than a gram and has just 157 million neurons.
Macaque monkeys, having just 7% as many neurons as we do, are smart enough to use stone tools.
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Our brains are slow
My answer is based on an article written by people who are as mystified as I am:
For many other tasks, our brains can only handle around 10 bits per second. That huge brain we have only allows us to keep a handful of items in our working memory at any one time.
That huge brain we have doesn’t give us strong multitasking abilities. Try listening to someone talk while you are trying to solve math problems. I bet you can’t.