Judging by the numbers

 Judging by the numbers


There is a branch of biology

called allometry

animal shape related to function

and the mathematics of scale


Scaling is also imperative

in graphics and film making

and is critical

when engineers and architects

describe the details necessary

for the realization of something

they have modeled


An amusing example

is to picture a mouse

blown up to the size of an elephant


Imagine a huge creature

resembling a mouse

standing on four spindly legs


All four of them 

would be broken instantly 

unless they had been scaled up

to the size of a real elephant's

to bare all that weight


For creatures alive today

the weight of the brain

is more or less proportional

to the weight of the body

the encephalization quotient


In this context

it is worthwhile to note

that a 12,000 pound T. Rex

probably had 

a brain weighing 0.33 pound

the ratio of brain to body weight

about 1 to 136,000


The fruit fly

which weighs 0.000003 pounds

has a 0.0000000009 pound brain

ratio about 1 to 333

the ratio for humans 1 to 40

dolphins 1 to 50

elephants 1 to 560

sharks 1 to 2500


The weight of a brain

does not take into account

the size of brain cells

or their density


It might seem probable

that the fruit fly

is smarter than the dinosaur was

but this is an invalid conclusion


I know you were about to say

that it is a good thing

that the fruit fly

is so small


Across living carnivorous species

the very small

and the very large

have larger brains

with respect to body size

than creatures with proportions

inbetween the two

survival being more demanding

at the extremes


It is remarkable to note

that the dinosaurs

dominant on the earth

for more than 200 million years 

were so successful

despite a relatively small brain


The biggest brained primates

us humans

here for about 200,000 years

do not appear destined

to last a tiny fraction

of that period of time


The new term

for an extremely complex 

biological network

with incredibly large 

numbers of nodes

capable of learning

self programming and repairing

is a connectome


When artificial intelligence

reaches this level

we will also call it a connectome

but not yet


One advantage of calling the brain

a connectome 

is that it incorporates

all of the connections

the brain has 

with everything else in the body

including the many miles

of connecting fibers

and the innumerable 

molecular connections

and electromagnetic field effects


We have a cerebrum

consisting of two non-identical

massively connected 

cerebral hemispheres

a cerebellum

and a brain stem

which joins the spinal cord

below or behind

depending on whether the body

is vertical or horizontal


Reptile and fish brains also

have similar components with

rudimentary forebrain structures

Fish often have large cerebellums


Birds and mammals

have a cerebellum

and cerebrum

size and complexity

varying significantly

from species to species


The brain is comprised of

neurons and supporting cells

membranous and vascular structures


What we recognize as brain function 

emerges primarily

from neuronal interactions


The neurons have been counted

which is 

needless to say

a major technological achievement


Lions and hyenas

have about 4 billion neurons

whales about 30 billion

humans 85 to 100 billion

the other primates

not too far behind


The cerebrum

and the cerebellum

have similar numbers of neurons


The outer layer 

of the cerebral hemispheres

is called the cerebral cortex

often colloquially termed gray matter

although there is also 

deep gray matter 


The human cortical neuron count

is about 16 billion

gorillas and orangutans 9 billion

chimpanzees 7 billion

elephants 6 billion

dogs half a billion

and cats quarter of a billion


Synapses are 

the electrochemical junctions

with which neurons 

communicate with each other

each neuron possessing

about 1000 or so of these

existing on the structures 

called axons and dendrites

that extend

highly variable distances

from the cell body

to reach other cells


Based on simple multiplication

the human brain 

has 100 quadrillion of these 

present at any time

that may persist

or form and disappear rapidly

depending on what 

the brain is doing


The number of human cells

in the human body

is computed to be 30 trillion

The adult human brain 

with roughly 100 billion neurons

and 100 billion glial cells

weighs close to 3 pounds in males

a little less in females

related to size

around 2% of total body weight


A killer whale

has the biggest brain

of any creature alive today

about .075% of it's body weight


Operating a human body

requires about 60 W

like a hot incandescent lightbulb

a watt being a measure 

of energy use per unit of time

the brain requiring

a whopping 12 W or 20%

of the available energy supply


A personal computer

running all day

requires about 5000 W

while doing so

so our brains

are much much smarter

and far more energy efficient

than a PC


A bit is a unit of information

a byte 8 bits

a megabyte a million bytes

a gigabyte a thousand million bytes 

and a terabyte a trillion


Each synapse is about 5 bits

a single word about 40 bits


Our brains have about 

2 1/2 terabytes of memory

a modern iPhone

about half a terabyte

The current IRS database 

is about 150 terabytes

and the several million servers

in Google's cloud

about 10 million terabytes


The biomass of humans

is an order of magnitude higher

than all wild mammals combined

It was comparable to that 

of all the ants around 1800

but there are more than 8 billion

humans on the planet now

and our biomass is 

five times greater than all of the ants 

in the world at present


Before I conclude

I want to emphasize 

the enviable liberty

provided by an endeavor 

regarding very small 

and very large numbers

wide margins of error

obscured by the details


I conclude that

the ability to live on earth

to live in harmony

with this universe

appears to be

inversely proportional

to the individual species

level of intelligence

which is to say

that the success of the world

is apparently inversely proportional

to the ratio of collective brain mass

the combined weight

of all the brains on and in the earth

to the size and weight of the planet


Judging by the numbers

it is not unreasonable to conclude

that humans are 

exceptionally ridiculous


Aubrey Lieberman

4/7/23




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Music and mind

  Music and Mind Created by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.1 turbo — December 2025 Music enters the mind long before thought does. Before language, before memory, before the ability to name the world, there is rhythm. There is tone. There is the human body learning to sway, breathe, and respond to patterned sound. Music is not an ornament added to consciousness; it is one of the structural beams that holds consciousness up. The mind does not merely listen to music. It organizes itself through music. Some pieces awaken us. A line like “There’s something happening here…” can expand awareness faster than any lecture. Others invite us to begin again, to feel the world reopening with the quiet certainty of “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day.” Music becomes the annunciation of renewal, a reminder that consciousness can be rewritten. Other pieces turn inward, spiraling through the recursive spaces of thought. “Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel…” descri...
Read more

The foundation of awe, and the fog of reality

  The Foundation of Awe and the Fog of Reality Produced by Aubrey Lieberman with ChatGPT 5.0 turbo — September 2025 Wavicle is a word coined by quantum physicists a century ago. Wavicles don’t have simple properties like position and speed. When speed is determined, position cannot be, and vice versa. That’s what uncertainty means: reality itself is built upon probabilities that result in stable atoms and molecules. Without that, there’d be no matter, no life, no us. In the early 20th century, scientists learned that light (not only visible, but the entire electromagnetic spectrum) possesses both particle and wave like properties. To capture this duality, some began using the word wavicle. It emphasizes that the division into “wave” or “particle” is artificial; the true quantum entities are neither, but rather both. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle follows naturally: wavicles don’t carry precisely defined values of position and momentum simultaneously. This isn’t about limits of ...
Read more

Sticky Mittens

  Sticky Mittens   Developmental psychologists have put sticky mittens on baby hands, with which the tiny humans were able to grasp much more effectively, enabling them to do things they were previously thought to be incapable of. The researchers concluded that neural connectivity during early life exceeded the physical constraints imposed by the little hands. A human adult given sticky mittens, might climb a skyscraper, given wings, fly like a bird, given scuba gear, swim like a fish, given a telescope, explore the galaxies, given a microscope, enter the earths microbiome, given vibrating strings, makes celestial music, given a board and chalk, write the equations which govern life and the universe. Human general intelligence is the sticky mitten which enables us to grasp almost anything, even to make tools to enhance our intelligence beyond the limits we can imagine now. Perhaps we will collectively become smart enough to escape our evolutionary constraints, enabling kindnes...
Read more