Suzana Herculano-Houzel

Associate Professor of Psychology Vanderbilt University

  • Nashville TN

Neuroscientist and international expert in how brain size and structure affect cognition and longevity in animals.

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Vanderbilt University

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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).

Areas of Expertise

Evolution
Neuroscience
Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
Neurons
Intelligence
Developmental Science
Quantitative Methods
Animal intelligence

Accomplishments

Fall 2019 Public Voices Fellow

A semester-long program designed to expand Vanderbilt University’s global reach by amplifying the impact of faculty academic research.

LARC-IBRO Travel Award, FALAN

2012

Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition, James McDonnell Foundation

2010

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Education

Université Pierre

Ph.D.

Neuroscience

1999

Case Western Reserve University

M.Sc.

Neuroscience

1995

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

B.Sc.

Biology/Genetics

1992

Selected Media Appearances

A First-of-Its-Kind Explainable AI Model Detects Brain Cancer

Psychology Today  online

2024-11-23

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).

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Do Crows Possess a Form of Consciousness?

Smithsonian Magazine  online

2020-09-30

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.

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Crows Are Self-Aware and 'Know What They Know,' Just Like Humans

Popular Mechanics  online

2020-09-28

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.”

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Selected Articles

Embodied (embrained?) cognitive evolution, at last!

Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews

Suzana Herculano-Houzel

2018

It is time that brain size stops serving as a black box-type property of brains, "somehow" related to variations in cognitive performance across species. We now know that hidden behind similar brain structure sizes are diverse numbers of neurons and fibers that can differ in function according to experience and environment and that species differences are not a continuation of individual differences.

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Longevity and sexual maturity vary across species with number of cortical neurons, and humans are no exception

The Journal of Comparative Neurology

Suzana Herculano-Houzel

2018

Maximal longevity of endotherms has long been considered to increase with decreasing specific metabolic rate, and thus with increasing body mass. Using a dataset of over 700 species, here I show that maximal longevity, age at sexual maturity and post‐maturity longevity across bird and mammalian species instead correlate primarily, and universally, with the number of cortical brain neurons.

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You Do Not Mess with the Glia

Neuroglia

Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Sandra Dos Santos

2018

Vertebrate neurons are enormously variable in morphology and distribution. While different glial cell types do exist, they are much less diverse than neurons. Over the last decade, we have conducted quantitative studies of the absolute numbers, densities, and proportions at which non-neuronal cells occur in relation to neurons.

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