This got deep
This is why I try not to overthink getting tfed a lot >.>'

And that's exactly why you should overthink getting tfed.

Kass ain't gettin' paid for shallow work!

True!

Wow....your description just nailed it. I'd never even thought of all this.

I certainly hope so! These journal entries/field guides are great for lending some extra detail on things that would take much longer to convey in comic format.

And each and every and so often i read this, i find myself cherishing your journal pageys - this information gets me hooked!
Almost as bad as a jinglet on oysters!

Pretty sure a lot of their wrinkles are dedicated to interpreting their echolocation.

And sex. Because we all know by now that dolphins are a bunch of effed up deviants, even by furry standards

Part of what holds dolphins back is that they have larger brains than humans, even proportionally I believe, but they're less dense. They have to be, to tolerate pressure at depth.

It's not the size of the brain that matters with intellect. It's the proportion of brain to body size. Humans have proportionally more brain for their body size than any other creature on earth. Even though a whale's brain is 4 times larger than our, it's body is far larger still. This makes me think that there needs to be a certain number of brain cells per body cell it interacts with. For instance, lets say it's a ratio of 100 muscle cells per brain cell. A creature with a 100k muscle cells would need 1k brain cells, but a creature with 1k muscle cells would only need 10. Expand that same principle to every cell in the body and it results in a smaller brain, but proportionally the same size.

Meaning that even if yinglets have half the brain size, if they're half the physical size of humans, then it's more or less equivalent in the end.

Basically. A Blue Whale's Brain is 4 times larger than a humans, yet their body is over 2400 times larger as well. Whales are dumb, dolphins and smaller whale's are kind of smart due to a better body to brain ratio, but big whales are pretty dumb.

Edit: This is by no means the only factor when it comes to intellect, just the one that has the biggest impact on brain size. Neuron Density and Wiring Complexity (? if that's a phrase that exists, Brain Wrinkles didn't sound as good) also play a significant factor resulting in some variation.

It follows, therefore, that so long as the ratio is the same you can fit a human mind into things even smaller than yinglets. Oddly brainy insects, perhaps?

That would be the logic. Im sure it's not that simple though. Other factors might come into play for small sizes. Like a minimum number of cells required for human intellect. I doubt you can fir human intellect on a single brain cell for instance.

It's probably better to talk about it as a certain size of brain per spinal cord diameter is required for "meat interface", and what's left over gets used for actual intelligence. Otherwise you wind up with the conclusion that yes, you can fit an arbitrary amount of intelligence in one cell (at the small end of the scale), or conversely can't fit it in a huge number of cells (at the big end).

I suspect if you could correct for differences in construction, you'd have to add the same amount of brain to a blue whale to get human-level smarts, in absolute , as subtracting from a human would result in blue whale level smarts. This may even not be all that much, considering corvids have even smaller brains.

I was oversimplifying for brevity/clarity. I was trying to make a point specifically about brain to body size ratios. Adding other factors would have muddied the waters a bit.

Birds are real smart for their brain size and Yinglets has hollow bones so they probably flew many millions years ago.
Or their brains was designed this way. Good chance Yinglets was uplifted from lesser Yinglets, the ones who was not converted that is.

Hyperpalliums mean you get more think per thonk, this could be it.

Technically bird bones are hollow to store air so they can breathe better in thinner atmospheric conditions, so maybe Yinglets could have also developed it from ancestors that lived in a time where the air was thin or otherwise difficult to get oxygen from?

It is believed oxygen levels rose and fell over the phanerozoic eon so that is plausible.

Forgot, I was just thinking of weight saving who also is an factor.

I think there are a couple of important things to think about when considering this.

First is our tendency to anthropomorphize things and only consider them in of how we see the world.

But what is intelligence? I tend to believe that most, if not all, creatures have evolved as they are for a reason, and their minds along with this.

This is complicated by the fact that we can't really get inside the mind of another person, let alone another creature. But as time has gone on , the level of higher development of other types of beings has become more and more apparent.

We have a chauvinistic tendency to imagine ourselves as being the most intelligent and self-aware beings on the planet, or even in the universe and beyond, but just because we imagine this doesn't make it so.

At the very least there's something to be said for a level of development appropriate to a particular being. Our imagining ourselves and our level of development as being superior to that of other beings is similar to how we commonly seem to picture a God in our own image. Just because we imagine things this way doesn't mean that that's actually the way it is. There's no real reason to assume that we're superior in the way we think to any other being.

The point of all of this is, yinglets have brains

The misconception about intelligence and physical proportions of the brain is that larger brains equals greater intelligence, but in actuality it's neuron density that equates to intelligence. We're so intelligent, not because we have the biggest brains in the animal kingdom, but because for their size they're especially neuron-dense. The density in neurons makes it easier for plastic transformation of neural pathways to occur, and for connections to be broken and formed.

Kass could absolutely have the same level of intellect she had as a human, but clearly we're seeing that when the human Kass was transformed into a Yinglet, he had his brain radically altered to that of a female of a completely different species, and possibly even clade, than him. The human intelligence is fighting for dominance in an instinct-driven brain that only has 3 things on it: Satiation, Survival, and Sex. It's entirely possible that her brain is MUCH more neuron dense compared to most yinglets because of the transformation, and that's causing short-circuits between the two sides that want control.

One side wants to fix the issue, retain its humanity, and continue being intellectual.

The other side wants to eat, frolic, and get bent over the nearest object and absolutely fucked until it's mush.

This is a good and pertinent analysis, but I would argue that in addition to satiation, survival, and sex, yinglets show a variable degree of intellectualism as well. Vizlet would be a prime example.

Some yinglets do show greater degrees of intellectual strength than others, however, that's to do with Nurture rather than Nature. Vizlet's intelligence is something that was groomed and nurtured into her, and she has been shown to starkly contrast against even the other leaders of the various clans in the fact that she is dramatically more intellectual than most of them. Furthermore, most of the yinglets in her group appear, with exceptions, to be more prone to being intellectual in general, and I firmly believe that is because Vizlet is actively promoting a form of 'standardized' and formalized education in her enclave.

This is, of course, not to say that they're not intellectual, but they are still very basal in their instincts and actions. Even Vizlet is not immune to the urge to satisfy her instincts, and even for her sex is still a thrilling prospect. She, like Kass, simply has more self control, but unlike Kass she's lived with it her whole life. Given the opportunity, Vizlet would most likely be more than happy to satisfy a suitable male with very little prodding I think.

Overall I'd agree with you, but I don't think we have any evidence that Vizlet or any of the other yinglet's level of intellectual ability is exclusively based on nurture. There's no reason to believe that there wouldn't be a variable degree of inherent intellectual ability, as with any creature, especially considering the outsize propensity towards variation and mutation that yinglet physiology has been shown to have.

You're confusing me talking about Ability, when I'm referring to Capacity.

It has been repeatedly, and quite clearly, demonstrated in the series that all yinglets have the capacity for higher intellectual awareness to varying degrees, this is not something that can be argued, the same as Great Apes, Felines, Corvids, and Canines can adapt to communicating with humans and by extension that knowledge both laterally and vertically amongst their respective species given the proper circumstances, or in exceptional circumstances across species boundaries. They have this quality by nature of their actual intelligence, this capacity is inherent irrespective of their environment or upbringing.

However, not all yinglets are observed to possess the Ability to display or properly take advantage of higher intellectual awareness. Those that do show this ability are almost exclusively in positions which lends no small amount of credibility to arguing that their intellectualism is being the result of circumstances that would be considered an exception, rather than the rule. Lopen is a very good example of this, because we saw him go from an absolute idiot who could barely comprehend the idea of 'exile' because he was on the streets and fighting for every scrap of food, to a rather thoughtful and cognizant individual who is now clearly capable of understanding complex ramifications for his actions after a couple of humans decided to sit down and talk with him. And potentially fuck his little bird brain out, but that's something I'd rather not ponder the logistics of...

This being said, as far as yinglet enclaves go we have a sample size of like... two, but one of them at least to us obviously places a greater importance on education, if only for the benefit of the humans in the neighboring city being less likely to Execute Order 66™. Are all yinglets intelligent enough to be intellectual? Yeah, with the exceptions of a few statistical outliers, definitely. Are all yinglets able to display such mental prowess without deliberate nurturing of such abilities? Probably, but I'd argue no more than that of your typical 4 to 8 year old child, which is to say the same level of intelligence as some of the smartest birds.

Fun fact, large bodies require large brains to move them. So if a yinglet's brain is proportional in size to a human brain, just smaller, he may not have needed to lose anything, because changes in size and changes in brain volume is pretty comparable. Add in that one creature can have a denser neuropile, and therefore (theoretically) have more IQ per brain volume, and yinglets may technically be *smarter* than humans, at least in raw potential.

Their comparatively shorter lifespans (even when they live to old age) kinda fucks them over tho. And differences in cognition seem to make schooling, at least human-style schooling, much more difficult. If the right techniques are used, some may prove to be quick lived polymaths, but these haven't been perfected yet. And then the reputation that the species has garnered in its short and recent rise to full sapience and civilization also leaves them at a substantial disadvantage as far as obtaining the technical resources required to gain new learning. Like books.

I do wonder though, how much of that shortening of lifespan can be attributed to their biology, and how much to them being quite a bit more violent and accident-prone than humans. I'm not sure if that was explored.

It was, in a research journal. Tbf, they don't live *that* much shorter lives due to the comparatively medieval technological progress in this world.

Smaller body volume means greater heatloss and generally faster metabolism. That in general forces the heart to beat faster. That is one limit to the lifespan for sure. Not necessarily 'The' limit but an important one. A heart that beats 300 beats per minute wears out faster than one that beats 80 going by the assumed baseline of similiar cell durability.

I recall an episode of the radio show Radiolab where they explored this. Turns out, the natural lifespan of a wild creature that dies of old age is roughly 8 billion heartbeats, no matter the species. That's why whales live so much longer than mice.

And seven out of eight are “disposable” males who get minimal resources which imho is why females seem smarter.

Smart, but also dumb

This is one of my favorite parts of transformation stories.
These kind of physical, mental, and social questions are what makes longer form transformation themed content so fascinating.

Why does the world look different, what changes about how you interact with it, where does society put you now that you are changed, how do you think now compared to before.
These things are all extremely interesting to see explored.

I agree, and I'm always a little disappointed when a story quickly moves on after the change, forgoing examination into these sorts of details in favor of getting the plot moving.

So, be the change you want to see in the world, and all that!

Bro this day has been so fun. I caused an explosion at school by accident because of a faulty wall outlet. Thanks for making my day even better!

This is a lowkey disturbing comment that I find oddly funny. Like, cartoon shenanigan's funny with a mix of psychological red flags.

That outlet had it coming

Well the good news for Kass is that less body requires less brain for the same smarts.

Question: was Kass all that smart to begin with? Elim seems to be the brains of the team.

It seems like they're both smart, just in different ways. Kass is ambitious, Elim is cautious. They balance each other out

Fantastic! ^^

God I love these bits.

Also House Salia's commitment to education in the ranks remains pretty impressive!

I like these bits as well! I just had to be careful not to bog down the comic with too many of them.

Nah. Just rewrite the entire thing to be Kass's post-transformation diaries, man.

Molecules. How do they work? <^\/^>

Molutism

Anyone else imagine Kassen sitting there for an hour drawing all those little circles in the body outlines?

I can easily imagine that, because my thumb is still sore

being anxious and running on instinct usually indicates a lack of prefrontal cortex activity

But what about postfrontal stuff!!!

There's more to cognition than just mass! I kinda wish Kass had the easy example of crows being a lot smarter than dogs in most ways. (That I've seen anyway. Uncanny.)

Yeah, corvids don't even have the wrinkly brains that we do. Their cognition may be quite alien to our own, but they're still undeniably smart.

And then there's octopods, whose brains are *so* alien that their intelligence is that much harder to gauge, but they're just as undeniably capable of impressive cleverness *despite* a brain that can get squeezed through small cracks.

Try out Children of Ruin (sequel to Children of time) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It has sapient octopodes. And they're very weird.

Edit: big arachnophobia warning for both books. The spiders are kinda the selling point.

Well both crows and yinglets have birdy legs and yell a lot

Fascinating study. I was reminded of the oversized tables and chairs in the Westerpark art installation in Amsterdam which were built to give full sized adults an idea of what life can be like for small children up to three years old. The giant chairs have gotten worn out by adults and tourists climbing all over them and have recently been rebuilt. (At least that is what I could gather from the text in Dutch.)

Oh yeah I a similar table & chair scale exhibit in a museum once as well. It's also quite a similar experience in a virtual reality space when you're in a tiny avatar and everyone is towering over you and all the rooms & furniture feel enormous. 😄

Haha yeahhh, same basic idea!

Don't worry Kass, it's not the size of the brain that matters (too much), it's how wrinkled it is that counts for all that Math and stuff 😜

Kass: "Oh no, I can't calculate 38,946.227 x 9322!"

“Could you do that before…?” 🤔

Reminds me of a memory from my childhood where I met some 5th graders as a kindergartner. They felt like giants. They were huge and towered over me.

Once I got to 5th grade, I ed that and tried to think on when my perspective changed. Now I was one of those giants, but I didn't even notice it happened. At what point did my perspective shift? Clearly it was gradual, but I didn't notice it. And even today, nothing really feels as if it's changed. Things just feel smaller.

Yeah, it's a lot more noticeable when it happens all at once! And also you have boobs

I find it absolutely HILARIOUS that Kass is "this" close to stumbling backwards into discovering something like Relativistic Mass but is "just" off enough to reach this conclusion instead.

Gotta handle one thing at a time!

Knowing you must have lost something but you no longer have the capacity to what it was

*screaming internally*

"I CAN'T ANY WORD THAT RHYME WITH ORANGE"

A lot of this explains why I really dislike 'macro/micro' stuff at an instinctual level
Like, a lot of this is stuff I know and understand subconsciously, so seeing stuff blatantly ignore it is a kinda slightly upsetting

Also, here's hoping Kass has the good sense not to let Isher see this one.
She's got enough to be anxious about as is

Poor Isher, haulin' around all them molecules all the time

mhmm, poor thing
I'm sure it must be incredibly hard to have that constant reminder that she isn't the sweet dainty thing she wish she was
I can't imagine the dysphoria she probably feels cause of it
certainly wouldn't help to have her see others noticing it

Sometimes little things make big differences in the world. Ahem. Foreshadowing and no i dont have spoilers i just see where this is going i hope i see a huge hug.

A hug is just huge without the e!

Isher running must be a terrifying thing for a yinglet. Be big doesn't mean being slow.

-Trex jeep chase scene-

Hey gang! A reminder that there's a place called "Top Web Comics" https://www.topwebcomics.com/?home=3 that compiles comics from various places. There's a bunch of cool stuff there. They have monthly votes, so you can OOPs there. You can vote once a day per device, so your PC, laptop, tablet, phone, etc.
I've noticed that you can sometimes even get in extra votes from different IP addresses, or if you're disconnected from your IP and open up again later.

Oops has been slowly climbing in the ranks, and closed out last month at 45th place and about 1065 votes. It's currently at 956 votes and 42nd place. The top vote getters seem to end up with something close to 20,000 votes.

Today is the last day to vote for this month. Let's push it!

Vote early, vote often! Help OOPs get noticed!

Three more votes and we could reach 41! Yo!

Made it to 967 and #42 I think. Two more and it would have been 41. Woo hoo!

Someday!!

42 is itself a pretty great number!

It's true.

Scavbotomy
One Flew Over Ze Yinglet's Nest

Jack Nicholson was great as Poak in that one

"What did I lose?" that is a very deep question in all of this.

Really tapping into the existentialism aren't we?

"Dignity"

Makes me imagine Kass standing up too quick and lodging in the ceiling like a projectile....

Reverse lawn darts?

Yep. Less likely to put an eye out, though...

Where's the fun in that? (Other than Kass hanging by their head in a hole from the ceiling that is.)

Reference: https://www.deviantart.com/valsalia.....-Pop-551219393

Imagine if that glowy rock thing made Kass allergic to yinglets, and that the symptom is turning into a yinglet.

And since Kass is always in close proximity to yinglets, she'll always have this allergic reaction. :D

HOW'D YOU KNOW

I AM A GOOD GUESSER

THAT'S MORE THAN A GUESS WHO'S YOUR INFORMANT?!

I am surprised they have an awareness of Molecules.

Probably just an equivalent. It's pretty obvious they don't have it all quite right in any case.

Yeah, I can see "Cells" being known. It makes me wonder about the technology level of the country Kass was from before it was destroyed. Especially if it's being taught to someone that became a soldier.

I believe I expressed this theory years ago, but I'm rather convinced this isn't really a fantasy/medieval setting. I think they have a lot of half-ed science that has been ed down and mangled over however long a span.

I enjoy the settings to do that. Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan did that. It's this epic fantasy setting and it turns out it's the distant future of the earth.

Agreed, it's a fun trope. Though for this one I'd lean more towards "lost colony world", which would explain a lot of things that have come up over the course of the comic better than "far-future Earth."

Oh whaaaat, I didn't get very far but had no idea about that!

There are really subtle hints throughout the story. Jordan likes to use history to influence the story. The whole theme of the wheel keeps turning. The show on Amazon, if you look at the mining town Rand and Matt stop in, they are not mining minerals... They are digging out ruins of a dump for "artifacts" of what was a landfill. Even in the beginning, you see them overlooking the city that was overgrown. At the 3:45 minute point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bspJ_5xsFq4

lol funny you actually considered the compressed brain thing. that too is a thing that made me curious and bothered me in the back of my mind; though it's easy to hand-wave away as "it's just magic, or technology so beyond our understanding it might as well be" it's still something that makes the sci-fi nerd in me want to explain lol. my first guess was I know the brain is highly redundant in some ways vs something like a hard-drive, so whatever changed them was likely so complex & precise, it could instantly figure out which neurons were redundant and somehow excise or compress them. Alternatively I and many other people might be short selling yinglet's neurological power; the core biology of their neurons might actually be superior to that of a human pound for pound and even match or exceed human intellect due to this, but due to their physical disadvantages have rarely been able to come close to meeting, thus 0 data loss at having one's neurons transcribed onto yinglet neurons.

lol or maybe it's like "fallout new Vegas" and their actual brain is like, in a pocket dimension right now. Now I'm kind of wondering if there is anything else the artifact did to them that just takes a certain stimulus to trigger or something. I mean maybe not "Kass is now a shonen protagonist" type of benefit, but at least being able to interact with the ancient tech in ways no other known being can?

Nah, according to the "intelligence is proportional to body/brain ratio" theory, you don't actually need a big brain to be smart. Presumably most of it is implementing filtering of incoming body-internal signals and fanout of outgoing signals, and to get human-level intelligence you only need a tiny sliver. It's just that because evolution is a blind watchmaker, that sliver is really, really, really spread out.

yeah that makes a lot of sense, I suppose "redundant" was the wrong word to use there?

Not entirely wrong: brains are quite resistant to neurons dying, partly by having a lot of spare capacity (but if human-built systems are any guide, nothing's really copy-pasted). True I wasn't referring to it though. But it probably is a factor; you can survive a surprising amount of brain damage without much loss because brains can learn to use the remaining neurons to do the job of the ones that died. Transformation magic could probably do much better.

Kass' brain is in the Cloud

How long did it take to draw all those tiny molecules?

IT TOOK ME AS MUCH TIME AS LIKE ALL THE OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS PUT TOGETHER

I salute your commitment sir.

Well that sounds like an existential crisis in the works

Kass got a whole existential crisis assembly line goin' in those yingbrains

and the little workers are fed with black coffee oysters while doing overtime.

The worst part about having an existential crisis post transformation: Not the realization that you've lost parts of your humanity, but the realization that you have no idea which parts may have been lost, or how long you'll end up going before you find out.

"I lost my dick but are my testicles still in there somewhere maybe????"

It might not even be deleted completely, just... blurred. Brains are weird.

Kass is undergoing some serious species dysphoria.

Well it sure ain't euphoria, that's for sure!

Val...Why do you need to get so DEEP with this stuff man?! Like holy crap!.. I’m a rat furry...Think about how much less brain mass I’d have in feral form, if I weren’t a Skaven Brood Queen...

This kind of stuff is both fascinating and blood scary as fuk to think about!

xD

Never stop!!

Oh I definitely won't! SO much of this sorta stuff left to tell.

I love this a lot.

And it loves you!

The brain could be more like an antenna, in which case she's fine. Not sure how well that normally works though... lol

Too bad the only thing being broadcast is "ying"

Wonderfully thought out and written.

Thanks! Been looking forward to getting back to these for a while now. There is so much to tell!

Well, humans use less than 10% of their brains, so it's likely Kass lost very little except stuff like storage space for short-term memory. Any Yings must use all of their brains.

That's a really old cliche. Not so sure it's true.

It's not at all true in the way that, eg, just sitting at the desktop uses less than 10% of your graphics card. GPUs are a prime example of something where that kind of metric does make sense (being the same basic submodule copy-pasted a lot), while a lot of the things brains do are localised to a particular area and if you lose that bit of brain you have trouble with that particular thing unless your brain can adapt to have other parts take over.

Nope.
Humans use almost all of their brain but different parts at different times.
If you use 100% you are having both a grand mal seizure and an extremely bad acid trip simultaneously.

It wouldn't even have to be a bad acid trip. LSD and similar psychedelics cause the random firings of neurons.

I know from my personal experience with acid and psilocybin that one of the main effects of a "Trip" of a sufficient dosage is a feeling of being overstimulated and overwhelmed by a combination of sensory stimuli and random or semi-random connections being made by ones mind. It's a distinct sense of your brain working at many times its typical pace and level of connection.

They are great for headbutting bugs!

What Ran should be wondering is.. during the transformation from human to scav, where the fuck did the molecules go?

A bunch of the melted through the floorboards!

Maybe they didn't lose anything because it's all in their soul?

The Soul as backup storage for the brain

Always back up your files.

I figure ying-brains are somewhat similar to crow's. In that they have a favorable brain to body ratio and a LOT of surface area, maximizing the limit space

Also they both yell a lot

I really love how he's been reflecting. Kass is a very thoughtful being

It's basically either that or worry endlessly about Elim lately

The two states of existence

Poor Kass... on a positive note: With a denser mass of braincells, birds do pretty damn well, with corvids and parrots being among the smartest animals, even with that relativaly small brains. Might be th same for Yinglets.

Yinglets would have bird brains, wouldn't they

Welp, Kass is technically correct, though it's the weight that really matters, and weight gets exponentially greater with size.
Big creatures need to move relatively more slowly because they have to a LOT of weight, while small creatures can move blindingly fast. It's also why cats and small animals can fall from high heights without getting injured while humans would break their bones for just a 2 meters fall.

I saw a video on YouTube of a Squirrel yeeting itself off the top floor of an apartment building. It was fine.

Kass' journals might help humanity figure out a few of these odds n' ends, who knows?

I wouldn't be surprised if Ran actually manages to figure out this specific tidbit. He does seem like a rather competent biologist.

Kass's certainty is wavering, i sense eminent enclave appropriation in fallout of local political instabilities....

This is very deep stuff. Excellent work.

Hmm interesting, corvids have tiny brains and are pretty smart, but yinglets got quite large heads compared to body. Or just you made them more cartoony. Imagine a ostrich size head, nope!

Using a small avatar in VRChat makes for a similar effect. Your eyes are closer together in that avatar so you really aren’t just shorter but everything else is bigger.
I need a Yinglet avatar for VRChat.

Wasn't Volume III in an earlier page?

Magnets, how do they work? Let's hope Kass never thinks on it.

Magnets get spooky

You can have severe hydrocephalus and have high IQ:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/rem.....rain-1.1026845

brb, injecting water into cranium for extra smarts

I am going to try to raise my tier back to the three dollar level, but it will take till at least spring before I can.

Is he misinterpreting Ishtar being self-conscious about her huge breasts?

She's just got a lotta molecules all over to haul around!

I always love how much thought is put into these. Especially these ones about how things are from Kass' perspective. It's almost like you understand how it is to be a Yinglet. Hmm, maybe you are a Yinglet! hahaha

I only decided on including these journals/field guides because I've put probably way too much thought into the subjects over the years : D

Molecules!? Sounds like devil worship

Same thing, really

He's 'soooooo close' to how things are. Also i seem to recall it's more about how the brain is structured and neuron connections rather than size. otherwise elephants and whales would be much smarter than us.

Lol dumb elephants, can't even do calculus

Yeahhhh, there's a lot more to a change in size than just needing differently-sized clothes! A difference in mass really does change just about everything in some way or another.

As you very clearly realize. : D

here's hoping the trade master looks at this and realizes they ought to try and find a way to make Yinglet housing a thing somehow

"Make a house, but smaller"

I mean sure, but convincing people to knock down a few empty derelict houses to cater to the lil rat burglars will probably be something of a hard sell

Especially as it'll likely result in structures that human guards will have trouble entering and operating within should the need arise; suddenly you need yinglet guards to patrol the "yinglet quarter," and that will be it's own brand of !!FUN!!

Re: Intelligence:
The way the human brain works is that it has many (relatively) sparse neural networks working on problems in parallel.
Networks that expect a stimuli to not be relevant to them stop processing it and return to idle.
Networks that think a stimuli is relevant to them process the input, then have a 'vote' to determine which network(s) have the best results, and those results on to the next stage of processing.
This structure *appears* to be the standard, but this is a new field of research so there's a lot of uncertainty.
We *think* this developed for energy conservation - using the entire brain all the time would consume so much energy that it'd basically be impossible to avoid starving, so it's really useful to be able to shut off entire lines of processing when they wouldn't help. (Neural network research is exploring in this direction - See Google's Minerva AI. This doesn't cull pathways, yet, but it does vote for best results.)

Anyway, long explanation short the end result of this is that instead of a loss of mass leading to forgetting how to do something, you can simply degrade the quality of the results. More pertinently, that decrease could be in the form of pruning pathways based on how often they're used - which is something brains do anyway.

The mental voting system is really complicated when the limbic system starts gerrymandering

Smaller body, lighter processor load to run all the systems and process all the telemetry, so you can get away with less brain meats? The brain does a lot that the conscious mind isn't really aware of.

As for the rest, the brain also uses a lot of shortcuts in how that processing works, assumptions that work well enough most of the time. Optical illusions and cognitive biases are examples of this, what you expect can also have a large impact on your perceptions, and the human brain is so heavily tuned for spotting shapes and patterns that it constantly gives false positives(the tiger you don't spot might kill you but the one you imagine probably won't).
Maybe yinglet brains have more of these "good enough" optimizations to help make do with fewer neurons?

Where'd your brain go, Kass?

Where'd it go?

This. This is why I watch you. You're actually thinking this stuff through and presenting the results to us. There ain't enough "furry" fiction like this out there, even in comics. If there's more stuff like this out there, I hope I can find it, or someone will tell me. Sometimes, it feels like the only furry fiction out there is badly written porn, and it depresses me.

Where's my awesome fiction starring fuzzy non-humans, dang it!!!

I agree! I wish there was more stuff like this available; so, be the change you want to see in the world and alla that, right?

Sometimes, ya gotta write the damn books yourself, aye? =P I think that's how Tolkien and Lewis got started... and now we have Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.

I need to get my own tail in gear. XD Stories won't write themselves!

Much the same is true for larger creatures. everything is too small and undersized.
It can be a task to avoid the smaller creatures that wonder underfoot unexpectedly and unseen.
this is why there's a general rule why do don't come within x range of a larger creature while they are standing, you are likely to get trampled :/

This is the way of life. and only one of the differences between them.

It's not something you tend to think about too often, being creatures who don't change height rapidly!

yeah, but we all how big the world was when we were children. it's like that.. but... short lived

Things that Kass has lost, part 1: Dignity, manhood, the ability to whistle...

Kass can handle a lot. But it's that last one that haunts him.

These entires have been very insightful. Not just to me, but I'm sure Ran as well. It makes me wonder if Viracroix has viewed them as well. Afterall, he wanted this extraction of knowledge from Kassen's itty bitty yinglet brain.

In before it is discovered that Yinglets actually have super-evolved brains

I'm going to share some of what I've been researching over time, in case no one has told you yet, Valsalia. Maybe you already know this but you here were playing a character who lives in a world where all this is still unknown. I will talk more than anything about brains and intelligence.

I have seen that others have already commented on the relationship between the relative size between the brain and the rest of the body of an individual. This is called the "encephalization coefficient", but it is obviously not the only factor, but it is relevant. Also very important is the "neural density" and the number of neurons that exist in the cerebral cortex (which is the most developed/evolved area of exclusively mammalian brains, and where the most complex thoughts are processed).
Due to the scaling laws that govern the sizes of the world, the volume increases and decreases 8 times for each time the surface is doubled or halved. Then, the greater the size of an individual, the number of neurons exclusively responsible for coordinating and controlling the movements of that body increases exponentially (this is why the encephalization coefficient is important). On the other hand, neural density refers to the number of neurons that exist in a given amount of space. Bottlenose dolphins, for example, have a very high encephalization coefficient (although a bit less than humans) and a brain of a larger absolute size than the human brain... but the neural density of dolphin brains is less than human. Another very noteworthy example are the crows, specifically the New Caledonian crows, which have been determined by studies that compare in intelligence to elephants, dolphins and chimpanzees; an intelligence comparable to a human child between 5 and 7 years of age is estimated. Their brains have been studied and despite being tiny... they have almost twice the number of neurons than the brains of monkeys of the same size and brain weight. It is especially surprising because birds followed a different evolutionary path and therefore did not develop the cerebral cortex like mammals but have a similar structure although more primitive than the cortex (pallium) but in the case of crows that structure is much more developed.
In conclusion, a creature can possess the same intelligence as a human despite being much smaller in size. What you need is to have a greater neural density carried along with the reduced size. It may even be possible that a creature 60 centimeters tall possesses human-like intelligence and a well-adapted and functional body (unlike the cases that small sizes are due to genetic diseases, because in this regard there have been humans who measured only 65 centimeters (2'1 ft)). Right now I'm imagining some species of intelligent and civilized rats that measure 60 centimeters or even less, but the smaller their heads in relation to their bodies, the greater their neural density must be. But it would not be good to abuse the neural density since the most certain thing is that the neural density can increase up to a certain limit.
There was a race of humans (homo sapiens) pygmies whose adults measured only 1 meter (3 ft), their heads were just a little smaller than those of normal humans, an almost negligible difference, this made those pygmies have larger heads than would be proportionally normal for their human bodies. But those were humans, separated by a very short evolutionary time, which is why they shared the same neural density as humans and that could not vary with such a short evolutionary time difference... therefore, to maintain intelligence at the human level, the coefficient of encephalization was what had to be increased, leaving the head the same size despite the fact that the body was reduced to slightly more than half the "normal" size.

First of all, the concept of the world made up of very small objects is already quite a revolutionary idea. But it is true that since the times of the ancient Greeks this idea was reached simply by deductive reasoning (it cannot be said that the Greek sages were scientists or did science, but they were impressively good at intuition and deductive logical reasoning). But they didn't talk about "molecules", the term molecules is very modern, the first time this concept came up was from Leucippus but it was just his apprentice Democritus who developed the idea and gave the elementary particles a name: "atoms", and the same word reveals this origin to you since its etymology (a/tom) refers to the non-divisible, so small that it cannot be separated, the smallest portion of matter.
Before that, and for a long time after, despite the ideas about atoms, the idea of matter made up of elements (water, fire, earth, air, and ether) remained very popular among wise men and scholars. This conceptualization had its complexity and its theories, added over the years and thinkers who believed in it, came to be in force even very late in modernity, ed by alchemists who already studied the stars and said that they were composed of ether. It was not until 1803 with John Dalton that the nature of atoms and matter was scientifically defined.

Oh definitely! Encephalization is a concept that's interested me for a long time, especially in corvids. And yeah; something that's both a core component of this comic, as well as a fun challenge, is making these early scientific document sorts of entries, based on the limited knowledge and research methods available at this period in history and scientific development.

Glad you're finding this interesting, and thanks for the detailed writeup! : D

On the plus side, having a much lighter body to move around would mean way more of the oxygen they breath would be allocated to the brain. all they need now is discover if they can eat cooked food, and *boom*, they save a bunch of energy on digesting stuff.

Birds have 2-to-4 times the neural density of mammals, so yinglets could be like that