Are bigger brains better?

By Lars Chittka, Jeremy Edward Niven. Current Biology, 2009

600 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62ef539e95058106ce8d4960aa0f674835b52e84

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

The evolution of self-control (2014, background): “novel functional networks in the human brain? J Neurosci 33(8):3259–3275.”
Insects have the capacity for subjective experience (2016, background): “But we agree with Chittka and Niven (2009) that the qualitative differences in processing capacity of brains at the insect and vertebrate scales are not as great as they might seem given the differences in neuron number.”
Minds without spines: Evolutionarily inclusive animal ethics (2020, background): “More fine-grained features, such as total neuron number, neuron density, connectivity, metabolic rate, and modularity are better indicators of the cognitive capacities of brains (Chittka & Niven 2009; Chitkka & Farris 2012).”
Grade Changes in Brain–Body Allometry: Morphological and Behavioural Correlates of Brain Size in Miniature Spiders, Insects and Other Invertebrates (2011, methodology): “, 2005) results from economy of design, using neurons for multiple tasks (Chittka and Niven, 2009).”
A 0.086-mm$^2$ 12.7-pJ/SOP 64k-Synapse 256-Neuron Online-Learning Digital Spiking Neuromorphic Processor in 28-nm CMOS (2018, background): “umption around 10W, yet it is capable of complex behaviors such as sequence and pattern learning, navigation, planning and anticipation, while exhibiting a learning speed outperforming human infants [4], [5]. Therefore, in order to bring silicon information processing devices closer to the efﬁciency”
Evolution of insect olfaction. (2011, unknown): “Even a fairly simple creature like the honeybee worker Apis mellifera shows a considerable behavioral repertoire, with at least 59 distinct and recognizable behaviors on the menu (Chittka and Niven, 2009).”