Think of Bertie Wooster, an idle but clueless rich man, and Jeeves, his genius valet, in a series of novels by P. What about smarts? We all know from our day-to-day interactions that some people just don’t get it and take a long time to understand a new concept others have great mental powers, although it is impolite to dwell on such differences too much.
(Note that postmortem measures are not directly comparable to data obtained from living brains.) In other words, gross brain size varies considerably across healthy adults. Removing brains after their owners died revealed that Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev’s brain broke the two-kilogram barrier, coming in at 2,021 grams, whereas writer Anatole France’s brain could barely bring half of that weight to the scale at 1,017 grams. As the density of brain matter is just a little bit above that of water plus some salts, the average male brain weighs about 1,325 grams, close to the proverbial three pounds often cited in U.S. Of course, there is considerable variability in brain volume, ranging from 1,053 to 1,499 cm 3 in men and between 975 and 1,398 cm 3 in women. Given that a quart of milk equals 946 cm 3, you could pour a bit more than that into a skull without any of it spilling out. An MRI study of 46 adults of mainly European descent found that the average male had a brain volume of 1,274 cubic centimeters (cm 3) and that the average female brain measured 1,131 cm 3. The human brain continues to grow until it reaches its peak size in the third to fourth decade of life. Is this true? Does a bigger brain make you necessarily smarter or wiser? And is there any simple connection between the size of a nervous system, however measured, and the mental powers of the owner of this nervous system? While the answer to the first question is a conditional “yes, somewhat,” the lack of any accepted answer to the second query reveals our ignorance of how intelligent behavior comes about. Adjectives such as “highbrow” and “lowbrow” have their origin in the belief, much expounded by 19th-century phrenologists, of a close correspondence between a high forehead-that is, a big brain-and intelligence. Consider the size of Woody Allen’s second favorite organ, the brain.
While “size does not matter” is a universally preached dictum among the politically correct, everyday experience tells us that this can’t be the whole story-under many conditions, it clearly does.
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