http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/the...hant-brain
EXCERPT: . . . The most interesting possibility to me, however, is that the African elephant might not have all the prefrontal neurons in the cerebral cortex that it takes to solve self-control decision tasks like the ones in the study. Once we had recognized that primate and rodent brains are made differently, with different numbers of neurons for their size, we had predicted that the African elephant brain might have as few as 3 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex and 21 billion neurons in the cerebellum, compared to our 16 billion and 69 billion, despite its much larger size—if it was built like a rodent brain.
On the other hand, if it was built like a primate brain, then the African elephant brain might have a whopping 62 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex and 159 billion neurons in the cerebellum. But elephants are neither rodents nor primates, of course; they belong to the superorder Afrotheria, as do a number of small animals like the elephant shrew and the golden mole we had already studied—and determined that their brains did, in fact, scale very much like rodent brains.
Here was a very important test, then...
EXCERPT: . . . The most interesting possibility to me, however, is that the African elephant might not have all the prefrontal neurons in the cerebral cortex that it takes to solve self-control decision tasks like the ones in the study. Once we had recognized that primate and rodent brains are made differently, with different numbers of neurons for their size, we had predicted that the African elephant brain might have as few as 3 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex and 21 billion neurons in the cerebellum, compared to our 16 billion and 69 billion, despite its much larger size—if it was built like a rodent brain.
On the other hand, if it was built like a primate brain, then the African elephant brain might have a whopping 62 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex and 159 billion neurons in the cerebellum. But elephants are neither rodents nor primates, of course; they belong to the superorder Afrotheria, as do a number of small animals like the elephant shrew and the golden mole we had already studied—and determined that their brains did, in fact, scale very much like rodent brains.
Here was a very important test, then...