/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10987161
Actually, that's Boskop man. A species only known by some fragments of their skulls.

The superintelligent Boskops had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads.

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us

“The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

We have seen reports of Boskop brain size ranging from 1,650 to 1,900 cc. Let’s assume that an average Boskop brain was around 1,750 cc. What does this mean in terms of function? How would a person with such a brain differ from us? Our brains are roughly 25 percent larger than those of the late Homo erectus. We might say that the functional difference between us and them is about the same as between ourselves and Boskops.

Boskop’s brain size is about 30 percent larger than our own—that is, a 1,750-cc brain to our average of 1,350 cc. And that leads to an increase in the prefrontal cortex of a staggering 53 percent. If these principled relations among brain parts hold true, then Boskops would have had not only an impressively large brain but an inconceivably large prefrontal cortex.

Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149.

Note: Brain size is indeed correlated about 0.44 with intelligence.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r173v725160tn626/

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us

This is about a prehistoric race of humans who were apparently highly intelligent, yet died out somehow. Their remains pop up around South Africa. They were highly neotenous (i.e., resembling children, having "baby faces" like some Asians have, it is a trend in hominid evolution for neoteny to be correlated with increasing brain size). They also had large brain cases. Anyway, I pasted important snippets here of the tl;dr article:

We have seen reports of Boskop brain size ranging from 1,650 to 1,900 cc.

Boskop’s brain size is about 30 percent larger than our own—that is, a 1,750-cc brain to our average of 1,350 cc. And that leads to an increase in the prefrontal cortex of a staggering 53 percent. If these principled relations among brain parts hold true, then Boskops would have had not only an impressively large brain but an inconceivably large prefrontal cortex.

Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149. [Anon's note: An MRI study showed brain size:IQ correlation of 0.44, so that's roughly 20%; http://www.springerlink.com/content/r173v725160tn626/]