An Analysis Of Suzana s Speech Is Both Interesting,...

Suzana’s speech is both interesting and informative, but by the end it has raised many more questions than it has answered. I would agree with her ending conclusion; that our primary advantage over other animals stems from the higher concentration of neurons in our cerebral cortex, and that this advantage was made possible by the advent of cooked food over raw food as our source of calorie intake. Within this paper I hope to not only share what I have learned and my own reflections on this lecture, but to also begin to tentatively answer some of the questions she brings forth for the purpose of expanding my understanding of this topic through contextual information. There are a number of key points to her lecture, the initial being that brain size does not correspond to cognitive ability as is commonly believed. Brains vary in the way that they develop from species to species. Furthermore, the specific function of neurons in the brain is far more important than the general presence of neurons. For example, a dog may have many more neurons devoted to processing olfactory sensory information than we do, but this does little to make the dog more intelligent. For the sake of increasing overall cognitive function there are several distinct areas in the brain that would benefit most from additional neurons. More neurons in the pre-frontal lobe would allow a larger short-term memory and thereby a larger working memory which would allow for faster and more complex problem