Researchers find that densely packed neurons play an outsize role in quantitative skill—calling into question old assumptions about evolution.
Much of researchers' interest originates from questions about human development, in what could have catalyzed our more sophisticated sense of numbers. “We look in the domain of mathematics a lot, because that's an area where humans seem unique,” says Cantlon. “How different are we? And how different are human children from other species when they're 4 and 5 years old?”
Slowly, a picture began to emerge: Animals who were closer together on the phylogenetic tree tended to perform similarly well in the experiments. Chimps were among the top performers, for example. Their close relatives, bonobos, were too. Lemurs, which are more distantly related to them, performed about average.
In the past, researchers often used an animal’s total brain volume as a proxy for cognitive power. Basically, the bigger the better. But when Bryer and Koopman pulled the data, they found a weak correlation between brain size and quantitative sensitivity. They turned to a relatively new metric—cortical neuronLet’s not mince words: To quickly count the number of neurons per milligram of brain, a researcher has to liquefy it.
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