Suzana Herculano-Houzel (1972-) The Human Advantage (2016)
A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable
7. What Cortical Expansion?
...The ability to plan for the future, a signature function of prefrontal regions of the cortex, may be key indeed. According to the best definition I have come across so far, put forward by MIT physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, intelligence is the ability to make decisions that maximize future freedom of action-that is, decisions that keep the most doors open for the future. If this is the case, then intelligence should rely on the ability to use past experience to represent future states (a function of the hippocampus, which gains neurons together with the remainder of the cortex), to plan the appropriate sequence of actions to get there, and to orchestrate their execution (functions of the prefrontal cortex). That is, the larger the number of prefrontal and hippocampal neurons available, the more intelligent a species should be.
7. What Cortical Expansion?
...The ability to plan for the future, a signature function of prefrontal regions of the cortex, may be key indeed. According to the best definition I have come across so far, put forward by MIT physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, intelligence is the ability to make decisions that maximize future freedom of action-that is, decisions that keep the most doors open for the future. If this is the case, then intelligence should rely on the ability to use past experience to represent future states (a function of the hippocampus, which gains neurons together with the remainder of the cortex), to plan the appropriate sequence of actions to get there, and to orchestrate their execution (functions of the prefrontal cortex). That is, the larger the number of prefrontal and hippocampal neurons available, the more intelligent a species should be.