These are muscles. They look kind of cool, right?
Now this is a nerve cell:
Not that big a deal. It’s just an octopus-looking thing with a universe in its center.
But what if I told you (Morpheus never said that) the last picture is where the true magic happens?
Your
brain’s motor cortex controls your muscles. Like the rest of the brain,
its plasticity is extremely high. It changes, and can learn to fire
more and more muscle fibers simultaneously. An increase in strength is
simply an increase in the efficiency of the nervous system.
We
tend to think of strength as a trait—like hair or eye-colour—but it’s
more like a skill. Someone lifting a lot of weight is not really
different from Messi gracefully caressing a football or Picasso
masterfully crafting a painting—they’re just a lot less cool.
We
become stronger at the movements we do because our brains become more
efficient at doing them. This explains why strength isn’t very
transferrable. (Insert bro who quarter-squats a ton but can’t full squat more than an empty bar here.)
I bet I look way more impressive now.
Consider this:
Pound for pound, a chimpanzee has twice the strength of a human being, despite carrying similar amounts of muscle mass.
How did I get dragged into this? And yeah, I’ll kick your ass.
So—what’s the difference between us and our furry friends?
You mean besides manscaping?
Well,
for one, they have longer and denser muscle fibers than we do, with
greater portions of those fibers being of the fast-twitch explosive
kind. But there’s another way we differ too—and it has a lot to do with
those nerve-cells.
Our brains have a lot
more grey matter than those of chimps. This means we have a lot more
fine motor control—a trait allowing us to play guitars, knit scarves and
operate on each other’s brains while flirting with nurses.
But
lacking grey matter also means a chimpanzee’s neural signals toward any
given muscle become a lot stronger than ours. While we are more wired
to work requiring fine motor-skills, they are more wired to break doors
off of cars and jump like superheroes.
Lol, look at that puny human bench pressing!
Think
of strength like this: Your muscles are a car. They can have a lot of
horse-power, but they’re simply a tool. The nervous system is the
driver. Without it, you won’t get very far. Some drivers don’t even know
how to turn an ignition.
So, even though
muscle mass definitely correlates with strength, some skinny guys may
just be really great drivers. Through more practice, they can have a
nervous system way more effective at the task at hand.
Talk about brain gains.
Update: This answer is a pretty big oversimplification. (Kudos to those of you calling me out on that.)
I elaborate on why in my answer here.
Muscle
mass, bio-mechanics, muscle moment arms, individual muscle fiber
characteristics, skill at a certain movement and psychological state are
amongst the multitude of factors deciding a person’s strength.
We humans have a tendency to look for simple cause and effect when reality is way more complicated.
And yeah, chimps are just 1.5 times stronger than us, and it probably has nothing to do with brain matter.
For
an answer to be fact-based, it should provide sources (and those
sources should be criticised and analysed.) If not, it’s an opinion, a
mere flawed re-telling of what somebody once heard or read somewhere
else.