The human brain is puzzling — it is curiously large given the size of our bodies, uses a tremendous amount of energy for its weight and has a bizarrely dense cerebral cortex. But: Why? Neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel puts on her detective’s cap and leads us through this mystery. By making “brain soup,” she arrives at a startling conclusion.
What is so special about the human brain? Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us? What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does?
When I became interested in these questions about 10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of. Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons.
Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. And yet, one is a chimp, and the other is a cow. Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it, but we eat them. I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are. So this is a first indication that the “all brains are made the same way” scenario is not quite right.
But let’s play along. If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be. So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able.
And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. It seems quite vexing. Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities.
It must be really extraordinary, an exception to the rule. Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be, with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies. So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body. That’s because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body. So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it’s the other way around. Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain.
The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses. Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. That’s 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working.
So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it’s special. And this is where the story started to bother me. In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us?
Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way. Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain. Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex. So this to me became the important question to answer: How many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals?
Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from. But nobody did. I’ve been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter.
So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup. This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain. Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it’s really fast.
So we’ve used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way. Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain.
The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be. Well, what about our brain then? We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities.
But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean. Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain.
So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos. That’s not possible. A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons. I don’t think it looks like us.
So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that we are not rodents. The human brain is not a large rat brain. Compared to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that’s not a fair comparison to make, given that we know that we are not rodents. We are primates, so the correct comparison is to other primates. And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos,which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate. And all of you are primates.
And so was Darwin. I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this. His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains.
So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. It is just a large primate brain. I think that’s a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature.
Why does it cost so much energy, then?
Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math. And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same,an average of six calories per billion neurons per day. So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect. So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we’re primates, not because we’re special.
Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don’t they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons?
When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there’s a simple reason. They just can’t afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons. So we did the math. We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day.
And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos. To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons. So it’s either a large body or a large number of neurons. When you eat like a primate, you can’t afford both.
One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point, it’s just not possible. Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do. Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate.
What about us? With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible. If we ate like a primate, we should not be here.
How did we get here, then? Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can’t spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body. Cooked foods are softer, so they’re easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long.
So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food.
So what is the human advantage? What is it that we have that no other animal has? My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that’s the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? In two words, we cook. No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. And I think that’s how we got to become human.
Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans.
