small/short people, dwarfs have sometimes small heads, homo floresiensis was small, birds have very small heads but prooven denser brain structure. science is “surprised” for example that floresiensis (hobbit) made tools but i can’t find any source (as well as personal experience) that small people with small heads are less intelligent. Also, we know that domestication if animals reduces their brain volume and it is thought to be connected with aggressivity and general defence of tweritory or dominance. Also we have some people apparently functioning totally normal with half a brain.

my question is, aren’t we still totally misinterpreting size with function? Is that already somewhere in literature? I mean just that aspect of volume, density and mental capacity?

  • Lembot_0006
    4·
    2 days ago

    I heard that many zones of the brain don’t have a designated purpose and can be repurposed in the case of the damages. So size is more about reliability, backups, etc than a criteria of pure intellect.

    • Neuromancer49@midwest.socialEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      I would bet, dollars to donuts, it’s less that those parts of the brain have no designated purpose, and more that we just don’t know them. Brains are really complicated and the tools we have to study them aren’t perfect.

      Part of what makes this so difficult to study is that we have very few regions of the brain with a single dedicated function. Outside of sensory and motor parts of the brain, many brain regions seem to do multiple things. Most function of the brain depends on networks of multiple regions firing together. Some regions of the brain can participate in multiple networks.

      Then, consider that our best tool to study brain networks, functional magnetic resonance imaging, has poor spatial resolution. You may see the same region of, say, a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, active during two different cognitive tasks like memory and motor control, but it could be different populations of cells that happen to be next to each other. Also, functional MRI is going through some growing pains right now - we just learned in 2026 that fMRI signal isn’t necessarily measuring neural activity as well as we thought, so it’s back to the drawing board for a lot of these studies.