E10: Brain Size

It's the big 1-0 here at Unsupervised Thinking and for it we are tackling a big topic: brain size! [insert obligatory "does size matter" joke here]. Ever since humans started using their intelligence to compare their brains to that of other animals, we've been searching for what makes us so much more intelligent than those other animals. In this episode we ask are we so much more intelligent? And if so is it due to our brain mass? volume? number of neurons? After summarizing how these properties vary across species, we get into the evolutionary pressures that would lead to big brains and how scientists study brain size today. Finally, we look within humans to see how brain size varies across people and whether it's correlated with intelligence. Throughout we learn that Conor is freaked out by the fact that whales are mammals in water and Josh has some really weird ideas about fabric.