Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory,

we're asked at the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

To hear it and every episode early and ad-free, plus hours of bonus content, check out

go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

We think very highly of the human brain.

After all, it's what lets us think about anything in the first place.

But nature is vast, and our primate brains are not the end-all and be-all of neural engineering.

There's a lot of talk about artificial intelligence these days, as it rises in prominence

and moves from sci-fi into household usage, but it's not the only type of AI out there.

We have animal intelligence and maybe even alien intelligence.

To truly understand our minds or those we might create or encounter out in space, we need to

look beyond our basic notion of human IQ to consider not simply where animals might fall on

an IQ chart, but the strange ways in which they can excel at some type of thinking compared

to other animals of similar intelligence or even exceed humans. Nor is IQ, intelligent quotient,

the only metric available, and when we're talking about animals, we might be better off using

EQ, and in this case we don't mean emotional intelligence, which is itself a good example of a specialized

type of intelligence, but rather encephalization quotient.

This type of EQ is an alternative to just measuring brain mass overall or as a percentage

of body mass.

EQ is a measure used to compare the brain size of an animal to what it would be expected

given its body size, providing insights in the potential

intelligence and complex behaviors of the species.

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