"No, the human brain does not have more neurons than the much larger elephant brain—but the human cerebral cortex has nearly three times as many neurons as the over twice as large cerebral cortex of the elephant."
Does the mass of neurons in the cerebellum give the ele' any greater capability? Longer memory for revenge, perhaps?
Probably has to do with control of the trunk and "infrasonic vocalizations" http://www.karger.com/Article/PDF/345565
if you believe the cerebellum mainly contributes to movement. Some argue that it also contributes to "cognition", as Herculano-Houzel points out. Interesting that her group previously reported that, across evolution, brains maintain a linear relationship between number of neurons in neocortex and number of neurons in the cerebellum:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20300467/.
The finding that 97.5% of neurons in the elephant brain are in the cerebellum would seem to contradict the idea that brains maintain a constant neocortical/cerebellar neuron ratio. The elephant paper attributes the huge number of cerebellar neurons to sensorimotor input, i.e., probably trunk stuff: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4053853/
Love it! There are some great web resources now for young coders in case you weren't already aware. Check out codeacademy, mykidcancode, and of course - scratch. In fact, I think Google has their own block programming initiative that they were showing at the maker faire.
You can do one better and submit a project with your son. Non-commercial projects that are accepted get in for free. (I'm a grown up and I can't tell you how proud it made me feel to present this year) :)
I am inspired to return more of the wonder of learning to my science classes. Coincidentally for me, this is happening with blended learning. More time is liberated for experiments and student operated demonstrations when I let Sal Khan do some of the teaching for me.
