In my first post on Polynesia I passed along what Houghton had noticed: that Polynesians should have long narrow heads but instead have a polar brachycephalic type instead. A perceptive commenter noted that North Europeans saliently defy this trend.
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This has been overall a very pro-Slavic series of tweets but I’m now going to pivot back toward explaining why you’re reading these tweets in English and not Czech and to clarify the specific role of the frontal lobe.
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A 2011 study found a cline of increasing frontal lobe volumes moving from SE to NW in Europeans, with the SE pole represented by Ashkenazi Jews. “Intracranial and brain volumes and cortical surface area progressively increase with the amount of inferred NW European ancestry”
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This effect was independent of height. If you’re Jewish and offended by this don’t worry: you’ll have your own opportunity to have your cock sucked in just a bit, too.https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/330168 …
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The blogger n/a made the connection between frontal lobe volume and head size as recorded by the old school anthropologists like Coon. The Irish are both Europe’s biggest headed and most lactose tolerant population https://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/07/nw-se-cline-of-brain-volume-in-europe.html …pic.twitter.com/FGX0tWmcaK
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The same tendency toward frontal overgrowth has been demonstrated on a continental level by comparing CEU(Utah Mormons) to more distinct groups like the Yoruba and Asians: “The proportion of the CEU component is associated with protrusion of the occipital and frontal surfaces”:pic.twitter.com/zw6GIUFyiD
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The regions of the brain that most strongly differentiate the CEU from the rest are that they have a shrunken occipital cortex (region 2) and a massive dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (region 11). The DLPFC is so small in West Africans you can barely see it in the image.
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It was Coon in 1955 who first noticed was has now become doctrine, that it is easier to cool a long, narrow head than a short, broad one. This explains the skull type seen in Africans and Abos and also why the frontal lobes are so small: they produce more heat
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Of course a sophisticated buttocks connoisseur takes into size and shape, but as far as sheer bulk nobody on Earth can compare with black Africans, whose asses face so little metabolic competition from their brain.
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“Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex” is a clunky term, but it’s very likely the most closely researched and dissected part of the human brain, playing a decisive role in executive function, planning, and inhibition.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorsolateral_prefrontal_cortex …
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I know it well too, because it appears often in the context of autism research, something I pay a lot of attention to. There is an old body of literature indicating enlarged head circumference in autistics, especially early in development.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/088307389601100509 …
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More refined later studies led by Eric Courchesne have confirmed the trend and specified that it seems localized to the DLPFC, where autistics possess 67% more neurons than control samples:https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104609 …
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My original title for this post was going to be “why are Northwest Europeans so nerdy?” and the basic thesis here is that their brain organization is tilting toward autism.
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The correlation between total brain volume and IQ is real, but weak (0.3-0.4). But a large brain volume seems to be associated with creative achievement in a way largely independent of IQ.
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It was once common for great scientists to donate their brains for study and this 1928 paper (really a meta-analysis) contains an amazing treasure trove of data related to the brains of men like Gauss: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1005434?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents …
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On Gauss: "The brain is in many respects the most notable of any in this series.... The surface configurations of the cerebrum are remarkable for the multiplicity of fissures and the great complexity of the convolutions....
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The richness of http://fissuration.is particularly notable in the frontal region while the subparietal regions, especially the marginal and angular gyres, exhibit a relatively enormous expansion."
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“The average brain-weight of the 108 individuals is 1473 grams, exceeding the various averages given for the European brain by 75 to 100 grams, and this without allowing for the advanced age of the men in this series.” This is more than would be expected from a 0.3 correlation.
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You may have noticed the tendency for famously accomplished nerds like Quentin Tarantino to have colossally overgrown foreheads. What you may not have appreciated is how that extreme creativity can co-exist alongside a relatively low IQ:https://io9.gizmodo.com/read-quentin-tarantinos-adorable-letter-to-a-13-year-ol-5800399 …
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And here is the world’s greatest living creative artist, who himself has an alarmingly large forehead, making the same point about Tarantino:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0imUF8EmDIQ …
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