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How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

bbc.com

141–143 of 143 posts

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#141
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe something along the lines of "our brains would overheat" - there's a small temperature window in which proteins won't denature, it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle), and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power. Maybe tin foil hats make good heatsinks.. Interestingly enough there is some evidence that the Gibbs free energy of ketone metabolism is more thermodynamically…

Doesn't that imply that people who live in hotter climates have...how can I put this politely?...a disadvantage when it comes to the stability of their brains? I would assume that the brain has a certain amount of redundancy, but has this ever been researched: How hot can it get before people start getting noticeably "stupider"?

Does this also explain why people in Scandinavia+Finland seem to be so clever?

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that's true for mammalian eyes, but what about insect eyes? If the bumble brain only hold 200k neurons, how many do their eyes have on board?

~7000 elements per compound eye according to this page: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/brookfieldfarmhoney.wordpress...

That's individual lenses, right? But it says that each lens has its own photoreceptor(s). So that is a multiple of 7000.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~7000 elements per compound eye according to this page: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/brookfieldfarmhoney.wordpress...

That's individual lenses, right? But it says that each lens has its own photoreceptor(s). So that is a multiple of 7000.

So if that's three photo receptors per facet, already each eye is rivaling the neuron count of the brain.
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