Tegan McCaslin – AI Impacts

Primates vs birds: Is one brain architecture better than the other?

By Tegan McCaslin, 28 February 2019 The boring answer to that question is, “Yes, birds.” But that’s only because birds can pack more neurons into a walnut-sized brain than a monkey with a brain four

Image credit: By J. Arthur Thomson - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17786/17786-h/17786-h.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9943793

Investigation into the relationship between neuron count and intelligence across differing cortical architectures

Survey participants (n = 83) were given anonymized descriptions of behavior in the wild for four animals: one bird species and one primate species with a similar neuron count, and one bird species and one

Brain wiring: The long and short of it

By Tegan McCaslin, 30 March 2018 When I took on the task of counting up all the brain’s fibers and figuratively laying them end-to-end, I had a sense that it would be relatively easy–do a

Transmitting fibers in the brain: Total length and distribution of lengths

The human brain’s approximately 86 billion neurons are probably connected by something like 850,000 km of axons and dendrites. Of this total, roughly 80% is short-range, local connections (averaging 680 microns in length), and approximately