Cetacean Intelligence - Brain Structure

Brain Structure

Elephant brains also show a similar complexity to dolphin brains, and are also more convoluted than that of humans, and with a cortex "thicker than that of cetaceans". However, in dolphins, "no patterns of cellular distribution, nuclear subdivision, or cellular morphology indicate specialization of the LC (coeruleus complex)" despite the large absolute brain size and unihemispheric sleep phenomenology of cetaceans. Moreover, it is generally agreed that the growth of the neocortex, both absolutely and relative to the rest of the brain, during human evolution, has been responsible for the evolution of intelligence, however defined. While a complex neocortex usually indicates high intelligence, there are exceptions to this. For example, the spiny egg laying anteater (echidna) has a highly developed brain, yet is not widely considered to be very intelligent.

Although many cetaceans have a great number of cortical neurons, after Homo sapiens, the species with the greatest number of cortical neurons and synapses is the elephant. All sleeping mammals, including dolphins, experience a stage known as REM sleep. Unlike terrestrial mammals, dolphin brains contain a paralimbic lobe, which may possibly be used for sensory processing. The dolphin is a voluntary breather, even during sleep, with the result that veterinary anaesthesia of dolphins is impossible, as it would result in asphyxiation. Ridgway reports that EEGs show alternating hemispheric asymmetry in slow waves during sleep, with occasional sleep-like waves from both hemispheres. This result has been interpreted to mean that dolphins sleep only one hemisphere of their brain at a time, possibly to control their voluntary respiration system or to be vigilant for predators. This is also given as explanation for the large size of their brains.

Dolphin brain stem transmission time is faster than that normally found in humans, and is approximately equivalent to the speed found in rats. As echo-location is the dolphin's primary means of sensing its environment – analogous to eyes in primates – and since sound travels four and a half times faster in water than in air, scientists speculate that the faster brain stem transmission time, and perhaps the paralimbic lobe as well, assist speedy processing of sound. The dolphin's dependence on speedy sound processing is evident in the structure of its brain: its neural area devoted to visual imaging is only about one-tenth that of the human brain, while the area devoted to acoustical imaging is about 10 times that of the human brain. (This is unsurprising: primate brains devote much more volume to visual processing than those of almost any other animal, and human brains more than other primates.) Sensory experiments suggest a great degree of cross-modal integration in the processing of shapes between echolocative and visual areas of the brain. Unlike the case of the human brain, the cetacean optic chiasm is completely crossed, and there is behavioral evidence for hemispheric dominance for vision.