On the relationship between neuronal heterogeneity and entropy

Neuronal size has often been used to explain the "superiority" of the human brain. By deriving the Shannon entropy of different statistical distributions, we show that the entropy of different distributions is solely accounted for by the variance of the distribution. We use total dendritic length (TDL) of neurons from different species as an example to show that entropy computed from TDL distributions has nothing to do with the absolute size of neurons, but the increased variance seen in the larger neurons.