Snapshot · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Magpies and parrots have a higher brain-to-body-mass ratio than humans — a fact that was quietly omitted when schools taught that humans top that list among mammals only.
Where this was said
At 50:50 · chapter starts 48:19
Tyson unpacks what 'intelligent life' actually means in a cosmic context, and the answer is uncomfortably complicated. [1] — Neil deGrasse Tyson "Humans are 4th in brain size among animals: By absolute brain mass, humans rank fourth among Earth's animals — behind whales, dolphins, and…" 49:54 By absolute brain mass, humans are fourth. By brain-to-body ratio, we top the mammal list — but not the bird list, with magpies and parrots exceeding us. Whales aren't building telescopes, but they might be considered intelligent by alien standards. Technology adds yet another layer: the Roman Empire had no electricity, computers, or radio receivers, so any alien signal sent to Earth 2,000 years ago would have gone entirely undetected — and they certainly weren't building spaceships. So 'intelligent life that can communicate across space' and 'intelligent life that has civilisation' are much narrower categories than 'intelligent life' alone. The operational definition matters enormously when asking whether we've been contacted or contacted others.
By raw brain mass, humans rank fourth on Earth behind whales, dolphins, and elephants. We invented the brain-to-body-mass ratio specifically to put ourselves at the top — but that only works among mammals. Mid-sized birds like magpies and parrots beat us on that metric too.
By absolute brain mass, humans rank fourth among Earth's animals — behind whales, dolphins, and elephants — meaning aliens prioritizing brain size might talk to whales first.
Animals first sensed light 540 million years ago, triggering an evolutionary acceleration known as the Cambrian explosion within 10 million years.
It is estimated that half of all cortical activity in the human brain is involved in visual function, underscoring vision's central role in intelligence.
Cognitive neuroscience literature shows that by age 6, humans can recognize tens of thousands of different object categories — far more data than early AI systems were trained on.
Only about 3% of FDA-approved drugs have genuinely unclear mechanisms of action, making an unknown mechanism a meaningful early red flag for any compound.
Even compounds that clear preclinical testing often fail in humans: 30 to 50% of drugs entering phase 1 trials do not advance to phase 2, frequently because human behavior differs from animal models.
More than 80% of published BPC-157 research comes from a single academic group whose researchers have IP and commercial interests connected to the molecule, limiting independent replication.
Roughly 100 peptide drugs are already FDA-approved, about 150 more are in clinical trials, and 600–700 are in preclinical development, underscoring the legitimacy of peptide science broadly.
The scientist who discovered BPC-157 refused to disclose the screening method used to identify the compound and has never fully published the parent protein sequence — what Peter Attia calls 'scientific trust me, bro.'
The brain's visual, auditory, and motor cortices light up nearly identically whether an experience is real or imagined, making visualization a form of actual neural training.
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