# Key Points from Transhumanist IRC Discussion

• Research on brain evolution revealed different pathways to encephalization across species, with a focus on how prefrontal cortex size and neuron distribution (rather than total count) contribute to cognitive differences between humans and other animals.

• Elephant brains contain 257 billion neurons (3x human brains), but with 98% in the cerebellum rather than the cerebral cortex, suggesting cognitive abilities may depend more on cerebral cortex neuron distribution than total brain neurons.

• Cases of hydrocephalus where individuals with severely reduced brain matter maintained normal cognitive function challenge conventional assumptions about the relationship between brain size and intelligence.

• Researchers discussed how specific genes like MCPH1 affect brain development and neuron count, exploring the evolutionary significance of the six-layer cortex structure and thalamocortical loops that are disproportionately larger in humans.

• The group debated whether human cognitive advantages stem primarily from neuron count or from specific "macrocircuits" that enable deeper combinatorial processing, longer inference chains, and nested representational structures.

• A paper on "Biologically based computational models of high-level cognition" was shared, examining how the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia create dynamic variable binding mechanisms potentially key to human intelligence.

• Nature's announcement about making articles "free to share" was criticized as misleading since it uses ReadCube, which only provides non-downloadable PNG images of pages.