Do you ever think about what the brain is about?

Brain scoop is taking over Earth unplugged to show you around the Field Museum in Chicago as Chief Curiosity Correspondent, which is pretty easy when you're surrounded by 25 million artifacts ranging from mosquitos to dinosaurs to arars and zebras and things yet to be discovered, and that got me thinking about whether a bigger brain is a better brain. The record size for brains in the animal kingdom goes to the sperm whale, weighing in at 7.8 kg or 17

Given that the smallest known mammal's brain, the atesin true, weighs just 60 mg and is 130,000 times smaller than the brain of a sperm whale, raises the question of whether a larger brain correlates with higher intelligence due to a bigger body or a smaller brain. Humans dominate this scale of intelligence by a wide margin. An even more sophisticated unit of measurement known as the iniz quoti, or EQ, is occasionally employed. It represents the ratio of an animal's brain to body size in comparison to other species of a comparable size.

You'd expect an animal our size to have a brain that accounts for about 3% of their total body weight, but our brain accounts for only 2% of our total body weight, even when compared to our closest living relative, Lucy. Homo sapiens means "wise man," so if my brain were bigger than yours, would I be more intelligent? May account for about a 6.7% difference in intelligence, but Albert Einstein's brain, at only 1230 G, was actually smaller than the average adult male's brain, which weighs around 1,400 G activity levels in the lateral prefrontal cortex a region

just behind the temple and the neural strength Pathways between this and the rest of the brain are thought to be major factors in determining intelligence. But what about elsewhere in the animal kingdom? While an ant may only have a brain the size of a pin head, put millions of them together and they have a collective intelligence. Take army ants, for example. If you put hundreds of them on a flat surface, they'll walk around in ever decreasing circles until they eventually die of exhaustion.

maintain the temperature of their nests within a degree so that each ant functions somewhat like a neuron inside a massive communal brain. Because of this, octopuses are thought to be the most intelligent invertebrates; some of them have even learned how to use tools. With one species carrying around coconut shells for hiding, they are completely lying even though they have nine brains in total—one central brain, large ganglia at the base of each arm, and 500 million neurons, or about the same amount as a dog. But what about brains from prehistoric times? It is believed that dinosaurs were roughly as intelligent as modern

Although the brain of a Stegosaurus was the size of a lime, reptiles and herbivorous dinosaurs frequently had smaller brains. The most intelligent dinosaurs may have been therapods, close relatives of our modern-day birds. They were thought to have large brains and excellent eyesight in order to catch their speedy prey. My friend Sue here is in the same group. She recently had her skull scanned, which revealed that she had enormous olfactory bulbs, the part of her brain responsible for smell, each the size of a grapefruit.

Although we have a lot to be grateful for, given our impressively large brains and their 86 billion neurons, you could argue that Sue had excellent nasal intelligence. I bet she made very easy decisions about dinnertime. In terms of social intelligence, dolphins and whales have a far larger and more elaborate limbic system than most creatures, including us. This limbic system is part of the brain area responsible for processing emotions, suggesting that their relationships and feelings may be more sophisticated and complex than we can ever begin to understand.

We still don't know a lot about ours or how other animals use them, but one thing is certain: there is still a lot more to learn. So, if you want to keep your brain active, subscribe to Earth Unplugged for more fascinating science about the natural world. You can also find me at The Brain Scoop to learn about even more fascinating topics to ponder about here at the Field Museum, where you can actually make diamonds out of peanut butter under pressure of approximately 5 million atmospheres. Although the earth's core contains 99 percent of all gold, there is still enough gold there that you could to.