A very naive question for Jacob. A few years ago the fact that bird brains are about 10x more computationally dense than human brains was mentioned on SlateStarCodex and by Diana Fleischman. This is something I would not expect to be true if there were not some significant “room at the bottom.”
Is this false? Does this not imply what I think it should? Am I just wrong in thinking this is of any relevance?
Bird brains have higher neuron density esp in the forebrain, but I’m unsure if this also translates into higher synaptic density or just less synapses per neuron. Regardless it does look like bird brains are optimized more heavily for compactness, but its not clear what tradeoffs may being made there. But heat transport cooling scales with the surface area whereas compute and thus heat production scales with volume, so brains tend to become less dense as they grow larger absent more heroic cooling efforts.
A very naive question for Jacob. A few years ago the fact that bird brains are about 10x more computationally dense than human brains was mentioned on SlateStarCodex and by Diana Fleischman. This is something I would not expect to be true if there were not some significant “room at the bottom.”
Is this false? Does this not imply what I think it should? Am I just wrong in thinking this is of any relevance?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/
I don’t understand the physics, so this is just me noticing I am confused. And not an attempt to debunk or anything.
Bird brains have higher neuron density esp in the forebrain, but I’m unsure if this also translates into higher synaptic density or just less synapses per neuron. Regardless it does look like bird brains are optimized more heavily for compactness, but its not clear what tradeoffs may being made there. But heat transport cooling scales with the surface area whereas compute and thus heat production scales with volume, so brains tend to become less dense as they grow larger absent more heroic cooling efforts.