10 September 2010

The human brain is shrinking

"Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball.  The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion... "This happened in China, Europe, Africa - everywhere we look."  If our brain keeps dwindling at that rate over the next 20,000 years, it will start to approach the size of that found in Homo erectus, a relative that lived half a million years ago..."

An excerpt from "The Incredible Shrinking Brain," by Kathleen McAuliffe, in the September 2010 issue of Discover Magazine.

5 comments:

  1. Maybe that tennis ball sized hunk of brain is the portion that goes along with eating and keeping our butts from getting eaten.
    Sneaking up on a stalk of wheat or ear of corn doesn't take much brain power. Chicken and Sheep are easy to trick into pots. Sabre-Tooth Tigers might need a bit of brain to avoid reliably.

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  2. Seems like this is a good thing given the mismatch between infant head size and adult female pelvis size.

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  3. I don't think this actually means much about intelligence. We get smarter every year - it's called the Flynn effect

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  4. This was a very interesting article. Is the brain becoming more refined? Do we need less brain mass as our daily lives become less involved in brute physical survival, especially agression/self defense? Nolandda has a great point, too. It would seem that smaller craniums (crania?) contribute to survival by not endangering mother and child during birth.

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  5. well, computers are getting smaller while capable of ever increasing amounts of power. Maybe our brains are just getting more space-efficient with all the squiggles and stuff. "squiggles", of course, is the scientific term.

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