■ 🕑 1. Brain Scaling Laws
   Fascinatingly, according to this paper, there are actually multiple biological scaling laws relating brain size to neuron count. Most mammals are on a relatively bad scaling law where, as the neuron count increases, the number of supporting glial cells must increase by a greater proportion, and the size of neurons must also increase. This means that increasing proportions of the brain must be devoted to glial cells and neuronal density falls so they run into sharply diminishing returns on scaling. Primates, in contrast, appear to have found a significantly better scaling law which allows us to scale neurons and glial cells 1:1 and to keep neural density constant across scales. This allows us to support vastly more neurons for a given large scale brain and explains why we are significantly more intelligent than larger animals like whales or elephants which have substianlly larger brains than us.