Biography
What are different brains made of? What is the extent of brain diversity, what are the rules and constraints, how does that happen in evolution, and what difference does it make? Suzana Herculano-Houzel is interested in comparative neuroanatomy, cellular composition of brains, brain morphology, brain evolution, metabolic cost of body and brain, sleep requirement across species, feeding time, and really interested in how all of these are tied together. Writes about neuroscience and science in general for the public; recently published The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable (MIT Press, 2016).Media Appearances
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A First-of-Its-Kind Explainable AI Model Detects Brain Cancer
Primary brain tumors can be subdivided into glial tumors or gliomas, and non-glial tumors. The human nervous system contains neurons and non-neuronal cells called glia. Neurons, also known as nerve cells or neurones, are excitable cells that transmit electrochemical impulses. The human brain consists of roughly 86 billion neurons, according to Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Ph.D., per her 2012 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).November 23rd, 2024
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Do Crows Possess a Form of Consciousness?
The crows’ neurons “have activity that represents not what was shown to them, but what they later report...to have seen—whether or not that is what they were shown,” Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neurobiologist at Vanderbilt University who published an analysis of the study in Science, tells Stat. This secondary layer of processing of the visual stimulus occurs in the time between when the stimulus appears on the screen and when the crow pecks its answer.September 30th, 2020
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Crows Are Self-Aware and 'Know What They Know,' Just Like Humans
In an analysis in the same issue of Science, another researcher, Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, makes a critique of the study’s hypothesis. The structure being studied, she says, could resemble another structure because of physical properties more than a shared evolution or an indication of extremely early consciousness. The size of the structures matter a great deal, too. “[T]he level of that complexity, and the extent to which new meanings and possibilities arise, should still scale with the number of units in the system,” Herculano-Houzel explains. “This would be analogous to the combined achievements of the human species when it consisted of just a few thousand individuals, versus the considerable achievements of 7 billion today.”September 28th, 2020
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What Was It Like to Be a Dinosaur?
Where did T. rex fall on the intelligence spectrum between dim-witted Stegosaurus and tool-using ravens? In a high-profile paper published last fall, neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University suggested that a T. rex was about as smart as a baboon—a startling conclusion because primates, with their large brains, are some of the cleverest animals around. Having spent long hours pondering the way brain volume scales with body size and what this relation means for brain function in extinct dinosaurs and birds, we were intrigued to see the headlines about this study. Superficially, the brain of the tyrant lizard king looks fairly puny compared with its body size. Weighing in at less than a pound, the brain of this six-ton dinosaur is diminutive next to the 11-pound brain of the African elephant, which, despite being the largest living terrestrial mammal has a smaller body than T. rex.August 20th, 2024
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The Tyrannosaurus rex May Have Had More Brains Than You Think
In a study published in the June 2023 issue of the Journal of Comparative Neurology, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, took a controversial first stab at calculating the neuronal count of several species of dinosaur, including T. rex.December 12th, 2023
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The T. rex may have been a lot smarter than you thought
That’s a level of brain cells similar to that in baboons, potentially making theropods — a group of vicious, two-legged and fast-running dinosaurs that included tyrannosauruses and velociraptors — the “primates of their time,” according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist and biologist at Vanderbilt University who wrote the paper.January 9th, 2023
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Pigeon Neurons Use Much Less Energy Than Those of Mammals
The finding is “pretty remarkable,” says Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who worked on the 2016 study but was not involved in the new research. Based on the density disparities between mammal and bird brains, she says, the energy difference is “exactly the math you’d expect.” Birds may have evolved this trait simply to work with their limited energy supply, Herculano-Houzel adds, rather than to accommodate advanced processing needs.December 1st, 2022
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What Elephants’ Brains Reveal About Their Dexterous Trunks
Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University who has studied elephant brains but wasn’t involved in the study, said the study was an important if limited addition to a scant body of research into the elephant brain.October 26th, 2022
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Why Some Animals Can Tell More From Less
Let’s not mince words: To quickly count the number of neurons per milligram of brain, a researcher has to liquefy it. (“She calls it ‘brain soup,’” Cantlon says of neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, who developed the method. “It is literally melting it in chemicals.”) In this case, the researchers used data sets from Herculano-Houzel’s lab, pulling published figures on neuron density for 12 species. Here, the correlation was clear: Neuron density had the biggest effect on quantitative sensitivity among all metrics tested, including traits like home range size and social group size. Since neuron density is largely constrained by a species’ genes, the team sees that as bonus proof that evolution plays a huge role.January 25th, 2022
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The real reason humans are the dominant species
As neurons are added to the mammalian brain, intelligence increases exponentially, says Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.March 27th, 2021
Multimedia
Education
Ph.D., Université Pierre
M.Sc., Case Western Reserve University
B.Sc., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Additional Resources
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