What are some characteristics that set killer whale brains apart from human brains? In ‘Blackfish’, you and the other scientists mention that a particular area of the orca brain is enlarged. If you look at the limbic system — the emotion-processing area in all mammal brains — you find something really interesting. There’s some parts of the limbic system of dolphins and whales that have changed and actually gotten smaller, but there are other parts of it that are adjacent areas that are much larger and more elaborate than in the human brain. That area is called the paralimbic region. So they have like an extra lobe of tissue that sort of sits adjacent to their limbic system and their neocortex. And, you know, you can infer from that. That lobe has something to do with processing emotions, but also something to do with thinking. It’s very highly elaborated in most cetaceans and not at all or not nearly as much in humans or other mammals, so it suggests that there’s something that evolved or adapted in that brain over time that did not occur in other mammals, including humans. In the movie, this is said to be a sign of a range of emotions that possibly outranks that of humans. Yeah, I think that it’s hard to say it outranks. … If you look at, say, the brain of an orca [and] the brain of a human, it would be difficult to say that the human brain was capable of more emotional depth than the orca brain, because — again — what you see in the orca brain is an elaboration on the limbic area that the human brain doesn’t have. So if that part of the orca brain is doing what it should be doing, as it does in all mammals — that is, processing emotions — it suggests [that] these animals are doing something very sophisticated or complex while they’re processing emotions. And I think also when you look at behavior of dolphins and whales, especially in the wild, you see a level of social cohesion that is really unmatched in other mammals including the humans.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 01:49:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015