So I have decided to write a few blogs over the next few weeks detailing some cool stuff on how the human brain has evolved.
First (and I don’t recommend doing this), if you were to lick a brain – it would taste salty. Why? Because the first central nervous systems evolved under water – salt water. Through the many aeons since, the brain has always had to be encased in this salty environment and thus our brains still taste salty. Neat huh?
I wanted to give people an idea about how the brain has evolved recently. The picture below shows how the brain capacity has increased in the last 3.5 million years in terms of cc (measurement of volume). As you can see, as we have progressed towards the present – brain capacity in the skull has increased.
But consider further, do you think the Brain has changed in its form or shape in order to accommodate more ‘room’ for processing information? You bet it has. So, take for instance this brain here:
This is a brain of a Rat (notice the large two smell sensors on the left of the image!) – but the key thing to notice here is how smooth the surface is. Now, contrast this with a human brain and what is the difference?
The difference (if you look closely) is not only size, but also the convolutions of the surface – these valleys in the surface of the brain increase the surface area substantially and allow room for more information and computing – this is what has helped make us human: but it only took a few hundred million years to evolve…
@Darren_Rhodes