Your brain is smaller than you think

The highly quoted number of human brian cells, 100 billion, doesn’t stand up to actual experimental inquiry, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, an assistant professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, told the Nature neuroscience podcast NeuroPod…

The result, Herculano-Houzel told Neuropod, was that on average the human brain has 86 billion neurons, with none of the four brains examined holding 100 billion neurons. “Even though it may sound like a small difference the 14 billion neurons amount to pretty much the number of neurons that a baboon brain has or almost half the number of neurons in the gorilla brain. So that’s a pretty large difference actually,” he said.