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A study on primates has established that gyral size is largely independent of overall brain size. Building on this, and other research suggesting that brain gyrification may mitigate the effects of head impacts, our study aims to explore…
Brain age is the estimate of biological age derived from neuroimaging datasets using machine learning algorithms. Increasing brain age with respect to chronological age can reflect increased vulnerability to neurodegeneration and cognitive…
Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of…
As the human brain develops, it increasingly supports coordinated control of neural activity. The mechanism by which white matter evolves to support this coordination is not well understood. We use a network representation of diffusion…
A phenomenon that strongly influences the demography of small introduced populations and thereby potentially their genetic diversity is the Allee effect, a reduction in population growth rates at small population sizes. We take a stochastic…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
Population genetic studies have found evidence for dramatic population growth in recent human history. It is unclear how this recent population growth, combined with the effects of negative natural selection, has affected patterns of…
Background: We have previously demonstrated that cortical folding across mammalian species follows a universal scaling law that can be derived from a simple theoretical model. The same scaling law has also been shown to hold across brains…
We study in detail a recently proposed simple discrete model for evolution on smooth landscapes. An asymptotic solution of this model for long times is constructed. We find that the dynamics of the population are governed by correlation…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
At large, most animal brains present two mirror-symmetric sides; but closer inspection reveals a range of asymmetries (in shape and function), that seem more salient in more cognitively complex species. Sustaining symmetric, redundant…
It is of great interest to quantify the contributions of genetic variation to brain structure and function, which are usually measured by high-dimensional imaging data (e.g., magnetic resonance imaging). In addition to the variance, the…
The human brains are organized into hierarchically modular networks facilitating efficient and stable information processing and supporting diverse cognitive processes during the course of development. While the remarkable reconfiguration…
A formula for an average connectivity between cortical areas in mammals is derived. Based on comparative neuroanatomical data, it is found, surprisingly, that this connectivity is either only weakly dependent or independent of brain size.…
The present article analyses the impact on cosmology, in particular on the evolution of cosmological perturbations, of the existence of extra-dimensions. The model considered here is that of a five-dimensional Anti-de Sitter spacetime where…
In the most extensive robot evolution systems, both the bodies and the brains of the robots undergo evolution and the brains of 'infant' robots are also optimized by a learning process immediately after 'birth'. This paper is concerned with…
"Boltzmann brains" are human brains that arise as thermal or quantum fluctuations and last at least long enough to think a few thoughts. In many scenarios involving universes of infinite size or duration, Boltzmann brains are infinitely…
Conventional visualization media such as MRI prints and computer screens are inherently two dimensional, making them incapable of displaying true 3D volume data sets. By applying only transparency or intensity projection, and ignoring…