Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Associate Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University, USA, is a biologist and neuroscientist who realized about 15 years ago that we still didn’t know the first thing about how many neurons and glial cells different brains are made of; realized that turning brains into soup was a good way to get those numbers; and has ever since been reexamining several dogmas of neuroscience in the light of actual data.