What is it about the human brain that makes us smarter than other animals? New research gives intriguing answer

By Emmanuel A Stamatakis, Lead, Cognition and Consciousness Imaging Group, Division of Anaesthesia, University of Cambridge
Andrea Luppi, PhD candidate in Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
David Menon, Professor, Head of Division of Anaesthesia, University of Cambridge

Humans are unrivalled in the area of cognition. After all, no other species has sent probes to other planets, produced lifesaving vaccines or created poetry. How information is processed in the human brain to make this possible is a question that has drawn endless fascination, yet no definitive answers.

Our understanding of brain function has changed over the years. But current theoretical models describe the brain as a “distributed information-processing…

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