What is the relationship between brain size and intelligence? What are the difficulties involved in interpreting the research?
What will be an ideal response?
One line of research looks at the relationship of brain volume to intelligence. The evidence suggests that, for humans, there is a modest but significant statistical relationship between brain size and intelligence. It is difficult to know, however, what to make of this relationship. Greater brain size may cause greater intelligence, greater intelligence may cause greater brain size, or both may be dependent on some third factor. Moreover, it is probably at least as important how efficiently the brain is used than what its size is. For example, on average, men have larger brains than women. But women, on average, have better connections through the corpus callosum of the two hemispheres of the brain. So it is not clear which sex would be, on average, at an advantage. Probably neither would be. It is important to note that the relationship between brain size and intelligence does not hold across species. Rather, what holds seems to be a relationship between intelligence and brain size, relative to the rough general size of the organism.
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