(February 8, 2010 at 9:52 pm)Pippy Wrote: Humans are sentient. Dolphins may also be, but most animals don't demonstrate the same level of consciousness and thought as humans. That is the difference. I have lots of love for animals though, non-human people. I think there is a marked difference between organic and non-organic too. My brain is likely a stronger system than most computers. May be not at math or reading 1's and 0's at speed, but at problem solving and memory and creativity. Humans are special, although we don't know why, or even in what exact ways...
Supercomputers are starting to surpass our brains in sheer number of functions per millisecond, it will be about 20 years or so before the PC market has that power. But everything is more likely to go cloud, so in 20 years we will all probably have terminal devices.
The main known link between brains and intelligence is the mass and surface area of the brain compared to the body size. The more massive the body the more brain function is required to regulate it, that is why many animals with brains far more massive than ours don't have the same intelligence, because their bodies are also massive.
The surface area is also crucially important and is believed to be a large part of what separates us from animals with comparable brain/body mass.The crevasses on the surface of the human brain are much deeper than comparable animals, making the flow of electrical signals far more 3 Dimensional and also allowing for a far more complex mesh network between neurons. The surface of the brain is where our body map is located, it is where out brain has it's own representational image of our entire body, it's position on the top of the skull making it vulnerable is one of the main reasons head trauma is so much more dangerous than it should be. Having the advantage of deep crevasses on the surface of the brain leads to features like enhanced motor function and allows us to do the intricate things we do with our fingers, it improves our ability to fill in the blind spot we all have in our eyes by interpreting the data, plays a large part in the appreciation of music (there was a study where all animals with the deeper crevasses from a variety of animals all reacted far better to musical stimulation) and a long list of other things.
That's got a big part to do with why we are the way we are, good combination of brain/body mass and surface area of the brain. It's not the whole story, but if you want to know how we were able to be like we are now, i would say evolving that functionality was key in allowing us to become human.
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