Brain-body allometry revisited across mammals
Humans today have much bigger brains than our close living relatives among the great apes. It used to be that scientists assumed that brain evolution followe...
All posts tagged with brain
Stone Age minds in internet time
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I mak...
Reading a review of ‘The Idea of the Brain’
This week I read a review in Nature of Matthew Cobb’s forthcoming book, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. The review by Stephen Cas...
Link: Profile of Tilly Edinger
Smithsonian has done a nice profile of Tilly Edinger, one of the most important paleontologists of the twentieth century: “The Woman Who Shaped the Study of ...
Thalamus in the spotlight
Knowable magazine, which covers research published in Annual Reviews journals, has a nice interview by writer Emily Underwod of Michael Halassa, an expert on...
Human brain evolution looks gradual. If you ignore enough data…
Bernard Wood’s research group has a new paper on brain size evolution in hominins, led by Andrew Du in Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B: “Pattern a...
Quote: Stanley Garn on the evolution of brain size
Stanley Garn, writing in “Culture and the direction of human evolution” (1963: 222):
Notable: Brain growth in Homo erectus
Notable paper: Cofran, Z. and DeSilva, J. 2015. A neonatal perspective on Homo erectus brain growth. Journal of Human Evolution (in press) doi:10.1016/j.jhev...
Variation in cognitive traits and genetics
A new study of more than 50,000 people has identified some of the genetic variations that underlie cognitive variation among middle-aged and older adults (Da...
To fish or not to fish
This summer I pointed to an article about the FwJj20 locality at Koobi Fora, which provides the earliest known evidence of systematic fish exploitation in th...
Forget EQ. Forget ‘Machiavellian intelligence’.
Evan MacLean and colleagues write this week in PNAS about the evolution of self-control.
Brain plasticity in adults and cognition
I ran across a study from a couple of years ago by Rachel Brans and colleagues, which has an interesting result showing a genetic correlation between plastic...
Brains in a haystack
An essay by Gary Marcus, in the new online science magazine, Nautilus: “Where uniqueness lies”.
Sahelanthropus brain
Kate Wong has been reporting from the Paleoanthropology Society meetings in Honolulu. Today she describes a presentation about the endocast shape of the Toum...
Microchimerism and selection
A recent article in Scientific American by Robert Martone explains some recent research on how fetal cells become integrated into mothers’ brains for the lon...
Speaking of Neandertal FOXP2
Tomislav Maricic and colleagues from Svante Pääbo’s group have reported finding a regulatory change in the gene FOXP2 that may be of relevance to the evoluti...
Micro-RNA 941
John Timmer covers the story of miR-941, a micro-RNA that may influence the expression of genes in human brains, and which appears to have taken on a novel r...
Einstein and Taung: two brains collide
Dean Falk has a new article in the journal Brain, in which she and collaborators uncover the details within historical photographs of Albert Einstein’s brain...
Keep still for your brain picture
Ben Deen and Kevin Pelphrey in Nature: “Perspective: Brain scans need a rethink” .
Quote: Jerison on animal intelligence
Harry Jerison, famous researcher of brain sizes across classes and orders of animals, commented on the relation of “encephalization” to the intelligence of a...
Building bigger dolphin brains
Ed Yong reports on a new study demonstrating a history of positive selection on the gene ASPM in cetaceans. Bruce Lahn’s group previously showed that this ge...
Mouse brain mapping
This merits some attention: “Neuroscientists reach major milestone in whole-brain circuit mapping project”.
Neuron theory
Ferris Jabr has begun a series called “Know your neurons”, which will be a tour of the types of neurons. The first installment (“Know Your Neurons: The Disco...
Denisova APOE status
I got thinking this evening about APOE, which includes a very well-known polymorphism of three alleles, where the most ancient (ApoE4) is associated signific...
Mailbag: Thrifty brains
Re: The thrifty brainotype.
The thrifty brainotype
Andy Clark, a philosopher of the mind, has entered a useful essay in the NY Times online commentary section: “Do thrifty brains make better minds?”
Mailbag: Did Neandertals have the derived MCPH1 allele?
Re: “Introgression and microcephalin FAQ”
Synchotron illustration
In the supplement of Kristian Carlson and colleagues’ paper on the MH1 endocast Carlson:Malapa:2011, there’s a nice comparison of the medical CT versus synch...
Mailbag: Genetics of schizophrenia
Re: Schizophrenia
Chimp brains don't shrink with age
The Wall Street Journal reported on Chet Sherwood’s work late last month: “Brain Shrinkage: It’s Only Human”.
No brain expansion in Australopithecus boisei
The endocranial volumes estimated for late Australopithecus boisei specimens (e.g., after 1.8 Ma) are larger than those of earlier specimens. Elton et al (20...
Adapting evolutionary psychology
I’ve been reading the new paper, “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology”, in PLoS Biology. The paper, by Johan Bolhuis and colleagues...
Brainy books
I was in the local library this afternoon and browsing through the science section. There were quite a number of popular books on neuroscience published acro...
Joshua Foer's memory racket
For Sunday morning (here in California, still, although it’s fading into afternoon in my native land), I can point you to a book excerpt by Joshua Foer, from...
Brain scans and gene scans
Wray Herbert notes the fallacy of interpreting fMRI and other brain imagery as especially meaningful: “The Brain Is Not an Explanation”. I’m pointing to this...
The mystery of left lateralization
This morning, a timely post by cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott addresses the localization of language functions on the left side of the brain:
Language bootstrapping the brain
Marina Bedny and colleagues Bedny:2011 show that, to a remarkable degree, the visual cortex of blind subjects takes on language-specific processing tasks.
Denisova microcephalin status
I’m still doing quick mining of the Denisova sequence for obvious things. One of the simplest is the polymorphism in microcephalin (MCPH1) that Evans and col...
Mirror macaques
Carl Zimmer reports on last week’s study showing rhesus macaques apparently passing the “Gallup test” for mirror self-recognition. I was talking about this i...
Mental mismatches
A Primate of Modern Aspect (“The sexuality wars, featuring apes”) writes about some of the reactions to the new book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of...
Bitwise consciousness
Carl Zimmer writes about theories of consciousness in today’s Science NY Times, and describes the work of my Wisconsin colleague, Giulio Tononi.
Mailbag: The teacher who wouldn't believe in shrinking brains
My son, a student at [redacted university], was recently ridiculed by his professor in class when my son suggested that the human brain has been shrinking fo...
Mailbag: Remembering the books
Regarding “Bubbling through college”:
Quote: Henry Fairfield Osborn's incomprehensibles
From Henry Fairfield Osborn (1927, Proc Am Phil Soc 66:373) “Recent discoveries relating to the origin and antiquity of man.”
Einstein's brain
NPR did a story this week on the “mysteries unlocked” by Einstein’s brain. Everybody loves to write about Einstein’s brain, it’s such an easy way to create a...
Mailbag: Migration and Malthusianism
Re: “Misinformation about brain evolution”
Misinformation about brain evolution
Due to Jerry Coyne, I encountered an interview in the Guardian with Colin Blakemore: “Colin Blakemore: How the human brain got bigger by accident and not thr...
Is there a common coding variant of FOXP2 in southern Africa?
Today I was looking through the online data files for the South African genome. Those online files are available from the Data Libraries entry of the Galaxy ...
Genetics of brain surface area and cortical thickness
The field of brain imaging has progressed remarkably during the past several years. I follow the literature because as the study of heritability of brain str...
"For the time being, Mr. Gretzky is still using his brain."
Benedict Carey describes the live online dissection of the brain of Henry Molaison (“Building a Search Engine of the Brain, Slice by Slice”). There’s a lot o...
Chimpanzee and human FOXP2 compared
A new paper in Nature (Konopka et al. 2009) reports on microarray expression comparisons of human and chimpanzee-specific versions of FOXP2. The change of tw...
Dead salmon reads your thoughts
Put dead fish in a scanner, push the button, and see what happens:
Handedness in ancient hominins
Michael Balter writes about the work of Liverpool archaeologist Natalie Uomini, who is studying the evolution of handedness by experiment and attempting to f...
Did an ice age boost human brain size?
What is going on? I mean, the heat this summer seems to have gotten to people’s heads. Except, it hasn’t been that hot. Heck, nothing could be hot enough for...
Mailbag: Bromage's KNM-ER 1470 reconstruction, systematic position of Homo habilis
(this letter refers to my 2007 comments on Tim Bromage’s KNM-ER 1470 reconstruction)
Rooks, tools, and "domain general" cognition
Christopher Bird and Nathan Emery (2009) performed a number of tool use experiments on rooks – birds related to crows (corvids) that do not use tools in the ...
Bigger brains, more cancer?
Rachael Rettner reports on a hypothesis that human cancer risk may be a side-effect of brain evolution. The hypothesis emerges from studies of gene expressio...
How the FOXP2 transgenic mice squeak
Nicholas Wade today covers a new study by Wolfgang Enard and colleagues, in which they generated transgenic mice expressing the human-derived version of FOXP...
Fossil fish brains from Kansas
So, there’s this fossil fish from Kansas that has the brain – the actual brain, not the endocast – fossilized. There’s a LiveScience story about it.
Recent evolution in Newsweek
I very much appreciate that Newsweek has started including a regular opinion column on science, written by Sharon Begley. I don’t always like it, but it plac...
Glucose metabolism and memory
Roni Caryn Rabin reports on a study linking blood glucose spikes to age-related memory decline:
Yawns, the brain cooler
When in doubt, cooling the brain always seems like a good answer:
IQ, brain size and genetics in children
Dienekes points to a study by Marieke van Leeuwen and colleagues, in which they assess the phenotypic correlation between IQ and brain volume in a sample of ...
H. M. dies after helping build the science of memory
A man known to most psychologists only as H. M. has died. Benedict Carey has the story. After a brain operation to relieve profound seizures, H. M. was left ...
Kids these days… with their gaming, and their Google
A long AP story today is subtitled, “Expert: Intense use of wired world may weaken fundamental social skills”.
An MAPT review
Elizabeth Pennisi writes this week a news focus in Science about the genome region labeled 17q21.31. I’m probably one of the few people who would recognize t...
Eye and visual cortex development
Neurophilosophy reviews an interesting paper that traces the directional preferences of visual cortex neurons in developing ferrets:
That is, unless you're on Team Jolie
In the Halloween spirit yet? If not, think about this:
Your brain on lactate
Interesting…
Biology of Mind: The Blog
I am doing a unique experiment with my course this semester, “Biology of Mind.” The course has a history of collaborative peer review on writing assignments,...
Working out how smart brains work
Scientific American Mind has an interesting article in the September issue, called “High-aptitude minds”. The article ponders explanations for how smart brai...
Worms do calculus
Another sign I’m not expecting enough of my students: “Worms do calculus to find food”:
Cybernetics and the brain-controlled robot
An interesting story from Popular Mechanics about progress in cybernetics, titled “Mind control stories.” It starts with the macaque controlling a robot arm ...
Acceleration's discontents
The June Scientific American (no link available) has an article on page 32 about the “therapeutic value of blogging.” That’s some relief, after the stories a...
The "amazing" Boskops
I've gotten a couple of e-mail questions from readers about this new book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence. The authors are Gary Lyn...
The next version of the Brain Atlas
Alan Boyle reports on the upcoming 2.0 edition of the Brain Atlas:
Floodlight humaniqueness
Michael Balter reports on a session at the AAAS meeting about human cognitive evolution:
Tool use linked to mirror neurons?
Michael Balter reports on recent research by Giacomo Rizzolatti, of "mirror neuron" fame. They taught some macaques to use pliers, and recorded what their n...
Human neurons discriminate fine sound frequencies as well as bats
A short paper in this week's Nature finds that neurons in the human auditory cortex have an unusual capacity for perceiving small frequency differences:
Drugging brains, young and old
I read two interesting articles today on brain performance-enhancing of one kind or another. Denise Grady of the New York Times contributes a long article a...
Nothing to fear but ghosts and leopards
There's a house in my neighborhood that puts on a giant show every Halloween, with graves, ghosts, and horror-show music. We call it the "Halloween house", ...
"The brain is still in beta mode"
I really like that quote, by computer security expert Bruce Schneier. The context, though, is sort of silly:
The complex landscape of diabetes
An Amanda Schaffer article, "In Diabetes, a Complex of Causes" in the Science Times covers recent research on Type 2 diabetes. The interesting part of the r...
Climbing holes into your brain
I often lecture to my 100-level classes on human adaptations to altitude and the effects of hypoxia. Our picture of these adaptations and other physiologica...
Encephalon 22: A neuroscience blog carnival
Welcome, everyone, to the twenty-second edition of the neuroscience carnival, Encephalon. Never in my life have I received so many e-mails with the subject ...
Mouse in a box… a big, big box
At last, someone may have the courage to try to harness the brainpower of the superintelligent fearless mice.
The lateral brain-tail connection
This is too weird:
Sleep on it
Another of the papers in PNAS online this week is this one:
Top-down versus bottom-up attention
This article in last week's Science seems interesting:
The Spock lesion
You are the captain of a military submarine travelling underneath a large iceberg. An onboard explosion has caused you to lose most of your oxygen supply and...
Making mice see red
I just wrote about the alteration of a behavior pattern (decision-making) resulting from injury to the prefrontal cortex. That is the kind of functional spe...
Brain evolution on the march
This PLoS Biology review, "Molecular insights into human brain evolution," is from 2005, but it's well worth reading. Here's the abstract:
Adult neuron migration
Neurophilosophy has this nice post reviewing work by Curtis and colleagues in Science. The main idea of the paper is that a neural migratory pathway in rats...
Ninety percent of your brain is (not) useless
I posted about the "Sherlock Holmes theory of mind" last month, which I often mention to my classes. The idea is that the mind has a limited (and small) cap...
"Altruism" in the brain
One of those impressively short brief communications in Nature Neuroscience by Dharol Tankersley et al. claims to have spotted a brain correlate of altruism...
Gene expression in the mouse brain
Last week's Nature included a report on the final draft of the gene expression atlas of the mouse brain. I wish this had come out last semester -- I could h...
Resource-stressed orangutans have smaller brains
That's what Andrea Taylor and Carel van Schaik conclude in this paper:
Shakespeare on the brain
I think this is just cool:
Computing the missing 99 percent
Science is running a brain-probing essay by Marcus Raichle, titled "The brain's dark energy." The basic idea is that most of the activity of the brain appea...
Mentally speaking in tongues
OK, I think it cheapens the idea of "speaking in tongues" if people can do it on command in an MRI scanner!:
The persistence of KIBRA
Gene Expression points me to this article by Andreas Papassotiropoulos and colleagues in Science (10/20/2006):
An brain atlas to the genes
The news stories are all about how Paul Allen has money to burn, but the brain mapping project is actually really cool:
Baby monkey see…
This PLoS Biology paper by Pier Ferrari et al. is highly interesting:
A brain for music
From Brainethics, I was pointed to this article in the Boston Globe about evolutionary explanations for music.
Developing that TV sensibility
The Times had this article the other day discussing whether TV is good for preschool-age kids. It's not all that interesting, but this bit near the end caug...
Quote of the day
Franz Weidenreich, in The Scientific Monthly 67, p. 106:
Domain of the Duff Man
People are trolling through the human genome looking for lots of things now. It's sort of like explorers trolling the coast of the Americas looking for game...
Math and language in the brain
Semenza et al. (2006) examined the mathematical abilities of aphasics with hemispheral dominance to determine which side of the brain is used for mathematic...
Another fast-evolving brain gene
This paper by Katherine Pollard and colleagues in the (execrable) Nature "online early" section examines a rapidly evolving region of the genome that, well,...
Does the primate brain follow the eye?
In the same issue of Journal of Human Evolution that we find the snake paper, there is an article by Christopher Kirk proposing that neocortex sizes in diff...
Setting the neural path of development
A really big problem in studying the evolution of the brain is that we have very little idea how the organ develops. So this paper by Bystron and colleagues...
Probably not a good idea
I was reading this Wired article about DARPA research on visual perception...
Geometry, music and the brain
The lead report in Science this week was this paper by Dmitri Tymoczko, titled "The geometry of musical chords":
Encoding of scents by the brain
I happen to be interested in smell right now -- it's a system in which chemical traces clearly function as iconic signs, but it's extremely ancient, and hum...
Broca's area and temporal organization
I was looking in Neuron to find this paper by Koechlin and Jubault about Broca's area. Here's the abstract:
Time to ditch "short-term memory"?
A study by Ingrid Olson and colleagues in the Journal of Neuroscience examines feature memory (memory about objects and locations) and relational memory (me...
Primate neurogenomics
James Sikela has a review in PLoS Genetics on genomics as applied to understanding human cognitive evolution (via Brainethics).
Molecular roots of plasticity
A Harvard Medical School press release (via Science Blog) describes a study by Majdan and Shatz in the current Nature Neuroscience:
Icons without the eyes
I've been keeping a few articles on my desktop that seem to follow a theme -- the notion of using technology to communicate visual signs through other sense...
Evidence-based medicine and education
I've been reading the very interesting Brainethics blog. Yesterday they pointed to an article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience by Usha Goswami about interact...
Complex structure of whale song
An interesting story from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (via Science Blog) about the information content of whale song. They don't know what the whales ar...
Waking memory consolidation
One of the proposed purposes of sleep is that the brain requires time to consolidate new learning, and requires an inactive consciousness to do it. But so f...
What is up with the prion gene?
In 2003, Mead and colleagues (Full text) suggested that the prion protein gene (PRNP -- OMIM) in humans had been under long-term balancing selection in huma...
What astrocytes do
This LiveScience article reviews some recent research.
Big brained bats
Yes, it's the expensive bat testicle hypothesis:
Oh, it's funny. What a relief!
Here's an AP story about humor and the sexes:
Mitochondriating your IQ
Again, a completely unrelated search unearthed an interesting paper. This time it really is a piece of Google archaeology, since it has zero citations accor...
Probing the brain toolkit, one disorder at a time
A short review in Science by Greg Miller discusses genetic correlates of dyslexia.
Prefrontal cortex white matter volume sets humans apart
This article by P. Thomas Schoenemann and colleagues is from earlier this year, but it's worth pointing to as a comparative study of more than just humans a...
Barbara King reviews The Singing Neanderthal
At the online book review section of Bookslut, the new Steven Mithen book, The Singing Neanderthal: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body is review...
Probing the correlates of SLI
This week's (9/27/95) PNAS has an article by Johannes Ziegler and colleagues (Université de Provence) titled, "Deficits in speech perception predict ...
Why are organisms modular?
Modularity is a property of biological organization: organisms are composed of subunits that perform different functions. At the cellular level, the cell is...
Brain genes evolving at the origin of Homo?
Aside from the two papers finding very recent evolution in human brain-expressed genes, there is another paper (subscription required) in this week's scienc...
Recent human brain evolution and population differences
This week's Science carries two research articles from Bruce Lahn's lab documenting recent (and potentially ongoing) genetic changes in human brains.
Another brain gene: AHI1
Ferland et al. (2004) examined the genetic etiology of Joubert syndrome (OMIM), in particular the gene AHI1 (OMIM). From the paper:
Will Mozart make you smarter?
As the new semester gets underway, it's a good time to think of ways to improve all those assignments I will soon be reading. Few are as pain-free as listen...
Brains and their changes
In Nature's "Progress" section (9/1/05): a paper by Robert Sean Hill and Christopher A. Walsh titled, "Molecular insights into human brain evolution."
Do you feel your nucleus accumbens, punk? Well, do ya?
According to Nature News, Brian Knutson and Camelia Kuhnen of Stanford have discovered that the interaction between two brain regions is involved in determi...
Doing my part for scientific literacy
Here's a familiar picture:
Gene expression and life history choices
Usually it's a bad idea for an anthropologist to start talking about fish biology, but this paper struck me as interesting:
Moving eyes, moving minds
A paper by Hannah Faye Chua and colleagues of the University of Michigan asserts that there are significant differences between Chinese and American graduat...
Brain gene powers … activate!
A literature search for another topic brought me this article from 2004 by Suk Jin Hong and colleagues (Johns Hopkins):
Fodor on Buller's Adapting Minds
Jerry Fodor reviews David J. Buller's book, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature in last week's Times Literary ...
Gene expression in aging humans and chimpanzee brains
A paper by Hunter Fraser and colleagues (2005) in PLoS Biology describes a survey of gene expression in the cortex of humans and chimpanzees and the cerebel...
Gene linkages with IQ
A paper by Danielle Posthuma and colleagues (2005) reports on a map survey of the human genome looking for loci that may be linked to IQ. They find two sign...
Macaques have neural homologue of Broca's area
A paper by Michael Petrides (McGill University) and colleagues reports that a brain region on the left side of the macaque brain, in the same general area a...
Language evolution update
Carl Zimmer has put together this week's news about language evolution. In one paper, mice with knockout versions of the FoxP2 gene were found to have troub...
Is this really news?
From a Reuters story:
Deep, dark secrets of his and her brains
An article of that title by Robert Lee Hotz of the LA Times is on the Yahoo News site. It is a profile of neuroscientist Sandra Witelson (McMaster Universit...
Microsatellite mutation and brain variation
Elizabeth Hammock and Larry Young (2005) report in Science that variation in behavioral traits among different species of voles is partly controlled by vari...
Now, here are some real brain mutations
This week's (June 16, 2005) Nature brings yet another example of the way brain function may be modulated (see earlier posts here and here). This time, the c...
MRG selection and the evolution of pain
I ran across a 2003 paper on the evidence of recent positive selection on the MRG gene family in humans. This gene family is specific to neurons in its acti...
Another genetic change leading to human minds
Wang Yinqiu and colleagues (2005) report on the phylogenetic history of the PACAP precursor gene in humans and closely related primates (hat tip: Dienekes)....
Cerebellar expansion in recent human evolution
Weaver (2005) examined the size ratio of the cerebellum and neocortex in fossil hominid brains. The division between the cerebellum and the cortex is one of...
The brain of the hobbit
News story on MSNBC
Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine"
This post in progress...
Brain expansion in A. boisei
Elton and colleagues (2001) examined the record of brain size in early Homo with the following question in mind: we know that brain size increased in this l...
Lifting all boats
James R. Flynn is a social scientist at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Beginning in 1981, Flynn performed a series of statistical analyses on the res...
Brain evolution: what do the genes say?
Reference: Dorus, S. et al.. 2004. Accelerated evolution of nervous system genes in the origin of Homo sapiens. Cell 119:1027-1040.