Estimated cost of mammalian brains

Range Table - link
Organism Mammals
Reference Herculano-Houzel S. Scaling of brain metabolism with a fixed energy budget per neuron: implications for neuronal activity, plasticity and evolution. PLoS One. 2011 Mar 1 6(3):e17514. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017514. p.6 table 4PubMed ID21390261
Primary Source See refs beneath table
Method "To investigate how the metabolic cost of the brain scales with brain size and whether the metabolic cost per neuron increases with neuronal size, it is necessary to examine how total energy consumption relates to the number of neurons in different brains. This analysis was made possible only recently, by the determination of numbers of neurons in the whole brain and its main structures [24–28]."
Comments "As illustrated in Table 4, the larger the number of neurons, the higher the total caloric cost of the brain, and therefore the more time required to be spent feeding in order to support the brain alone."
Entered by Uri M
ID 110882