• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

This Guy Had The Biggest Brain Ever Recorded In A Human

November 4, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A man whose brain was more than double the average weight holds the record for the heaviest thinking organ ever recorded. Sadly for the owner of this giant cerebrum, however, bigger doesn’t always mean better, and in this case resulted in intellectual disabilities before an untimely death in a mental health institute.

According to Guinness World Records, the accolade for the heaviest brain belongs to an unnamed man who lived and died in the Netherlands in the late 19th century. After suffering from epilepsy and developmental problems, the unfortunate brainbox passed away at the Meerenberg Asylum at just 21 years of age.

Advertisement

During the man’s autopsy in 1899, Dutch pathologist Gerard Christiaan van Walsem recorded a brain weight of 2.85 kilograms (6 pounds 4.5 ounces). Typically, human brains range between 0.9 and 2 kilograms in weight (2 pounds to 4 pounds 6.5 ounces), with the average being around 1.35 kilograms (3 pounds).

Funnily enough, human brains have actually been shrinking for the past several thousand years and researchers aren’t entirely sure why. According to one study published in 2021, the reduction in brain size may have something to do with the “externalization of knowledge” resulting from the invention of writing and other forms of data storage.

The authors also speculate that the evolution of complex societies may have reduced the need for large brains as we are now able to rely on “distributed cognition” for collective rather than individual decision-making – just like ants!

And while there’s no indication that human brains are likely to become insect-like in size, we do know that having a smaller brain doesn’t necessarily make you less clever – just as a larger one doesn’t always increase intelligence. In 2019, researchers looked at the cranial volume and cognitive abilities of more than 13,500 people in the UK, concluding that IQ was not determined by size.

Advertisement

Instead, brain structure and connectivity are likely to be more important than size when it comes to cognitive capacity. That’s why women and men retain the same intelligence despite male brains being around 11 percent larger, reflecting differences in body size between the sexes.

Research has also found differences in cranial volume between different global populations, with East Asians displaying the largest brains with an average size of 1,415 cubic centimeters (86.3 cubic inches). European brains, meanwhile, tend to hover around 1,362 cubic centimeters (83.1 cubic inches) while African cerebrums measure 1,268 cubic centimeters (77.4 cubic inches). 

Despite these differences, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any one population is more or less intelligent than another, underlying the fact that size really doesn’t matter.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: This Guy Had The Biggest Brain Ever Recorded In A Human

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Saturn And Neptune Will Reach Their Brightest In Days – And Look For Saturn’s Temporary Beauty Spot
  • Reindeer Bring A Gift Greater Than Any Of Santa’s – Hope Of A Stable Climate
  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version