The large size of the human brain is what makes us (arguably) the most intelligent creatures on Earth, but new research surprisingly reveals our brains may have been slowly shrinking from about 3,000 years ago. Are we getting less smart? Scientists aren’t ready to declare that yet, but have found a possible answer for the brain size mystery by studying ants and the use of collective intelligence in their social organizations.

Smaller Brain = Less Intelligence?

Researchers have found that for much of human evolutionary history our brains kept growing. In fact, if you count from our last shared ancestors with chimpanzees six million years ago, the human brain size almost quadrupled. This happened thanks in part to the improving diet and nutrition of early humans. Cro Magnons, the Homo sapiens that had the largest brains in history were alive from 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. But as the recent study from scientists at Dartmouth and Boston Universities points out, around 3,000 years ago, our brains began to diminish.

The Size Of Our Brain Through History

Previous research estimated that, over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human brain went from 1,500 cubic centimeters (cc) to 1,350 cc — shrinking by about 150 cc, or 10% (the size of a tennis ball, as commentators have pointed out.) “Most people are aware that humans have unusually large brains—significantly larger than predicted from our body size. In our deep evolutionary history, human brain size dramatically increased,” said the new study’s other co-author James Traniello, of Boston University. “The reduction in human brain size was unexpected.”

Our Brain Was Always Growing And Growing. And Then It Stopped. 

The big question of course is, “Why is our evolution going in reverse?” The interdisciplinary research team, which included a biological anthropologist, a behavioral ecologist and an evolutionary neurobiologist, write in the study that their dating techniques do not “support hypotheses concerning brain size reduction as a by-product of body size reduction, a result of a shift to an agricultural diet, or a consequence of self-domestication.”

Why Did Our Brains Start Shrinking? Here’s Why They Did Not. 

The scientists believe that the reason we don’t need the same size brains lies in the creation of our social systems, which favor distributed gathering and sharing of knowledge and information while offering advantages in “group-level decision-making.” Since brains use a lot of energy, being able to draw upon the knowledge gathered within a larger society would require less individual brain energy to be expended in order to store and process information. Thus a smaller brain would be able to do the job just as well.

So, Why Did Our Brains Start Shrinking?

Interestingly, the researchers also suggest that the advent of writing around 5,000 years ago likely had a pronounced effect on the “neural architectures” of individual human brains by increasing the power of group cognition. Decision-making by an increasingly interconnected group could have led to “adaptive group responses exceeding the cognitive accuracy and speed of individual decisions and had a fitness consequence.” This could have led to the human brain size decrease “as a consequence of metabolic cost savings.”

But What Was The Start Of It All?

Unexpectedly, the researchers arrived at their conclusions by studying ants. As the scientists write in their paper, “Humans live in social groups in which multiple brains contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence.” While understanding the historical forces affecting brain evolution in humans is a complex undertaking, with only the fossil record to use for evidence, the researchers looked at ant communities.

And What Brought About That Idea?

“The remarkable ecological diversity of ants and their species richness encompasses forms convergent in aspects of human sociality, including large group size, agrarian life histories, division of labor, and collective cognition,” explain the scientists in the study. The range of social systems in ant societies allowed them to test out hypotheses and come up with insights that provide a general look at how selective forces can affect brain size.

Ant Sociality And Human Sociality

The research team focused specifically on creating computational models that represent patterns of worker-ant brain size and energy use, looking at groups of Oecophylla weaver ants, Atta leafcutter ants, and the common garden ant Formica. What they found is that collective intelligence and division of labor had an effect on the variation in brain sizes. In a group with shareable knowledge and individual specialization in particular tasks, brains were likely to adapt for the sake of efficiency, consequently diminishing in size.

Division Of Labour Affects Brain Size

“Ant and human societies are very different and have taken different routes in social evolution,” Traniello shared. “Nevertheless, ants also share with humans important aspects of social life such as group decision-making and division of labor, as well as the production of their own food (agriculture). These similarities can broadly inform us of the factors that may influence changes in human brain size.”

Ants Are Not Humans, Of Course

A review of the book in The American Journal of Sociology read: “After many years” observation of the behaviour of ants, the author has written a popular book attempting to show how ant societies function, how they solve many of the ‘social problems’ confronting man - war, reproduction, sustenance, pressure groups, security, democracy, and totalitarianism. In addition, one finds a tracing of the rise of the ants as a race, their diversification, their struggles for dominance, their tastes for odors, forms, and textures, their modes of ‘gossip’ and memories.”

In 1946, Dr. Caryl P. Haskins Wrote “Of Ants and Men”

As the author of “Of Ants and Men” himself remarked in 1946, the question is how far can we compare these ant societies with our own without becoming hopelessly involved in a bog of anthropomorphism? In other words, he goes on to reflect, can we legitimately “go to the ant” without reading into our findings many things that really do not exist? While this new research doesn’t have definitive answers, the new modeling is a fascinating step forward in getting closer to a fuller picture of our evolutionary transformation.

“Go To The Ant”

A successful team is a group of many hands and one mind.

The human brain shrank in size about 3,000 years ago. Scientists may have found an explanation by studying ants.

Scientists may have found an explanation for the surprising decrease in human brain size about 3,000 years ago by studying ants.

Can Collective Intelligence Be the Reason Why Human Brains Are Shrinking?

Imagine growing up without words. You live in a typical industrialized household, but you are somehow unable to learn the language of your parents. That means that you do not have access to education; you cannot properly communicate with your family other than through a set of idiosyncratic gestures; you never get properly exposed to abstract ideas such as “justice” or “global warming.” All you know comes from direct experience with the world.

What Lack Of Language Practically Means

It might seem that this scenario is purely hypothetical. There aren’t any cases of language deprivation in modern industrialized societies, right? It turns out there are. Many deaf children born into hearing families face exactly this issue. They cannot hear and, as a result, do not have access to their linguistic environment. Unless the parents learn sign language, the child’s language access will be delayed and, in some cases, missing completely.

Lack Of Language Is Not A Scenario. It’s Some People’s Reality. 

Does our mind develop normally under such circumstances? Of course not. Language enables us to receive vast amounts of information we would have never acquired otherwise. The details of your parents’ wedding. The Declaration of Independence. The entrée section of the dinner menu. The entire richness of human experience condensed into a linear sequence of words. Take language away, and the amount of information you can acquire decreases dramatically.

Language And The Mind

The lack of language affects even functions that do not seem to be intrinsically “linguistic,” such as math. Developmental research shows that keeping track of exact numbers above four requires knowing the words for these numbers. Imagine trying to tell the difference between seven apples and eight apples. The task becomes almost impossible if you can’t count them—and you can’t count them if you never learn that “seven” is followed by “eight.” As a result of this language-number interdependency, many deaf children fall behind in math, precisely because they did not learn to count early on.

Language And Number Interdepedency

Another part of your mind that needs language to develop properly is social cognition. Think about your interactions with your family and friends. Why is your mom upset? Why did your friend go inside the house just now? Understanding social situations requires inferring what the people around you are thinking.

Language And Social Cognition

Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; So far, the evidence does suggest that the limits of our language mean the limits of our world. However, what happens if language disappears once the mind is fully developed? Will we then lose the ability to use math and understand others?

What If Language Is There And Then It Disappears? 

Imagine you are a typical adult; let’s say you’re 40. You wake up one day, and suddenly, you realize that your language is gone. You look around the room, but no words come to mind to describe the objects you see. You’re starting to plan out your day, but no half-formed phrases rush through your mind. You unlock your smartphone, but, instead of text, you see a sea of squiggles. Desperate, you cry out for help, and someone rushes up to you—but, instead of speech, all you hear is meaningless murmur.

Nightmare Scenario: You Wake Up And Your Language Is Gone

The condition described above is known as global aphasia. It arises from severe damage to the brain, often as a result of a massive stroke. While some aphasias are temporary, in some cases the damage is irreparable, and the person may lose language for life. In your case, let’s say that a dozen doctors examined you and said (or, you think they said) that nothing can be done. If the limits of your language mean the limits of your world, should you conclude that the way you experience the world is now fundamentally limited? Do you even have a mind?

Again, Not A Scenario. It’s A Reality, Called Global Aphasia. 

Research on adult individuals with aphasia has demonstrated that math, theory of mind, and many other cognitive abilities are independent from language. Patients with severe language impairments perform comparably to the rest of us when asked to complete arithmetic tasks, reason about people’s intentions, determine physical causes of actions, or decide whether a drawing depicts a real-life event. Some of them play chess in their spare time. Some even engage in creative tasks. Soviet composer Vissarion Shebalin continued to write music even after a stroke that left him severely aphasic.

Loss Of Language Doesn’t Equal Loss Of Mind

In recent years, neuroscientists have isolated a network of brain regions (typically in the left hemisphere) that react almost exclusively to linguistic input. They respond to written sentences, spoken narratives, words, monologues, conversations, but will not activate in response to memory tasks, spatial reasoning, music, math, or social situations that do not involve dialogue. No wonder many patients with aphasia do not have impairments in other cognitive domains—language and other functions are housed in separate chunks of brain matter.

Language Is Separate From The Rest Of Cognition

Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought”; Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; and Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”

Language And The Mind - The Writers’ Perspective

Not all writers support Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s idea that language and thought are inseparable. Tom Lubbock, a British writer and illustrator whose language system gradually deteriorated because of a brain tumor, wrote in his memoir shortly before his death in 2011:““My language to describe things in the world is very small, limited. My thoughts when I look at the world are vast, limitless and normal, same as they ever were. My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.”

Language And The Mind - A Language-less Writer’s Perspective

So, what can we say about the role language plays in shaping our minds? Well, pick a mind that is still developing, and you will find that removing language will alter it for life. However, pick a mind that is fully formed and take all words away, and you will discover that the rest of cognition remains mostly intact. Our language is but a scaffold for our minds: indispensable during construction but not necessary for the building to remain in place.

Once We Acquire Language, We Can Live Without It

Language is the dress of thought.

Language is what makes us human, what lies at the root of our awareness, our intellect, our sense of self. Without it, we cannot plan, cannot communicate, cannot think. Or can we?

Once we acquire language, we can live without it.

Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind

Over the past 12 years, Chris Anderson has had a ringside seat, listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers. He’s helped them prepare their talks for prime time, and learned directly from them the secrets of what makes for a great talk.And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient. And it’s this: Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listeners’ minds an extraordinary gift - a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea.

The #1 Task Of A Speaker

During a talk, X number of people, many of whom have never seen each other before, are finding that their brains are starting to sync with the speaker’s brain and with each other. They’re literally beginning to exhibit the same brain-wave patterns. They’re not just feeling the same emotions; there’s something even more startling happening.

Brains Sync

If we could look inside the speaker’s brain, we would see billions of interconnected neurons in an impossible tangle. But if we looked closer, we would see that a few million of them are linked to each other in a way which represents a single idea. And incredibly, this exact pattern is being recreated in real time inside the minds of everyone listening; in just a few minutes, a pattern involving millions of neurons is being teleported into X minds, just by people listening to a voice and watching a face.

Ideas Teleport

What is an idea anyway? Well, we can think of it as a pattern of information that helps us understand and navigate the world. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic.Our minds are teeming with ideas, and not just randomly. They're carefully linked together. Collectively they form an amazingly complex structure that is our personal worldview. It’s our brain's operating system. It's how we navigate the world. And it is built up out of millions of individual ideas.

Our Ideas Are Our OS

That’s why ideas really matter: if communicated properly, they're capable of changing, forever, how someone thinks about the world, and shaping their actions both now and well into the future. Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture.

Human Software Update: New Ideas Installation

If you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task: <ol><li>limit your talk to just one major idea</li><li>give your listeners a reason to care</li><li>build your idea, piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands</li><li>make your idea worth sharing</li></ol>

Guidelines For Successfully Installing Ideas 

Ideas are complex things; you need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you’re most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly. You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid. So pick one idea, and make it the line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links back to it in some way.

Limit Your Talk To Just One Major Idea

Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. And the main tool to achieve that? Curiosity. Stir your audience’s curiosity. Use intriguing, provocative questions to identify why something doesn’t make sense and needs explaining. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone’s worldview, they’ll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap. And once you've sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea.

Give Your Listeners A Reason To Care

You use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listener’ minds - but not your language, their language. You start where they are. The speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences. Now, metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already understands.

Build From Your Listeners’ Ground Up

Ask yourself the question: “Who does this idea benefit?” And be honest with the answer. If the idea only serves you or your organization, then, sorry, it’s probably not worth sharing. The audience will see right through you. But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else’s day or change someone else’s perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us.

Make Your Idea Worth Sharing

There's no single formula for a great talk, but there is a secret ingredient that all the best ones have in common. TED curator Chris Anderson shares this secret - along with four ways to make it work for us.

There's no single formula for a great talk, but there is a secret ingredient that all the best ones have in common. TED curator Chris Anderson shares this secret -- along with four ways to make it work for you. Do you have what it takes to share an idea worth spreading?

TED's Secret To Great Public Speaking

Those listening sessions are likely making me less productive. You’re having so much more fun that you feel more productive.

The Illusion of Productivity When Listening to Music

Listen to music for 10 to 15 minutes before you start working.<ul><li>Listening to tunes you enjoy can put you in a better mood and relax you. Your brain releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which gives you a “warm feeling of pleasure.” </li><li>You may also get a hit of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which elevates your mood and can make it easier to focus.</li></ul>

The Best Way to Listen to Music for Productivity

Unfortunately, listening to music also takes up some of your attentional capacity, meaning that if you listened to it while working, you’d have fewer resources left to direct toward the task at hand.The exception is when you’re performing tasks that are repetitive or monotonous, such as when you’re working on an assembly line or driving for long periods of time.

Music And Attentional Capacity

Stashed ideas

A Neuroscientist Explains Why You Should Stop Listening to Music While You Work

Control your mind = control your impulses.If you are also facing mind control problems then here are some fast-tips to save your day.

Will Power

To exert self control, you need to find your motivation when it matters. It can be anything like playing 2 hour game after 5 hour study.

Find Your Motivation

People who have better control of their attention, emotions and actions are better off almost any way you look at it. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their career.

Better Self , Better Life

The prefrontal cortex controls your decision of control. It's your prefrontal cortex that tells you to eat salad instead of fast food. And I think that controlling your mind through your brain is the best way.

If You Can't Control Mind, Control Brain Then

Meditation. Meditation. Meditation.The ultimate weapon against wandering and wild mind. Learn to meditate.The easy method is to close your eyes and focus on your breathe. Inhale and exhale.

Can Collective Intelligence Be the Reason Why Human Brains Are Shrinking?

Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind

TED's Secret To Great Public Speaking

A Neuroscientist Explains Why You Should Stop Listening to Music While You Work

Develop Willpower

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