Brain and brawn

Question

Usually bigger animals have bigger brains, supposedly because the brain needs to control more overall mass.

Males have Biggers brains than females, or must I say taller humans have bigger brains than shorter humans, and intellegince scores seem to be equal regardless of brain size across tall and short humans, males or females they be.

The same works for animals, an elephant is not much smarter than a raven or a mouse.

This indicating further more than brain size might be a really important factor in the overal size of an animal.

But humans can grow to enormous unnatural sizes through use of steroids, size that some speculate might not be possible naturally, even with decades of training.

Is there any scientific paper examining the relationship of unnatural big humans using steroids and their brain adaptations to the newly built muscle mass?

Obviously fat mass is excludes as it doesn't require much neurological control and it's mostly a passive mechanism.

So papers comparing brain adaptains to obesity might be interesting but are not the purpose of this question.

this is in no form or way a rant and if you believe so then I'm sorry for not formulating my post correctly

What I'm looking for is to better understand how the mind adapts to muscle growth.

Answer 1

I do not agree with the premises of your question.

First, large animals such as elephants are far more intelligent than the corvids. Yes, corvids demonstrate impressive problem-solving skills, but our assessment of their intelligence is, in this regard, very one-dimensional. We are judging their intelligence in entirely in simple, measurable terms based on a handful of simple cognitive tasks, ignoring all manner of sensible, emotional, and communicative processing that their brain anatomies tell us they are capable of.

Brain size is associated with the total number of neurons and synapses, and hence raw processing power. For the time being, we are a long way from understanding exactly what other animals are processing, but those neurons and synapses exist for a reason. Thus, any judgement of animal intelligence that we make now is necessarily egocentric.

What we do know is that neural development has very little to do with muscle bulk. It is related more to the complexity of neural control required. Thus playing the piano, or performing in highly skill-based sports (gymnastics, dance sports, racquet and ball sports, martial arts, ...) would catalyse far greater neural development than simple muscular strength and size development. Our parting evolution with the other primates was primarily associated with our movement from foraging to our hunting in groups, the latter requiring all manner of processing associated with strategy and communication.

I hope that casts a different perspective on your question.