Related papers: An Adaptive Threshold in Mammalian Neocortical Evo…
Understanding individual cortical development is essential for identifying deviations linked to neurodevelopmental disorders. However, current normative modelling frameworks struggle to capture fine-scale anatomical details due to their…
The cerebral cortex displays a bewildering diversity of shapes and sizes across and within species. Despite this diversity, we present a universal multi-scale description of primate cortices. We show that all cortical shapes can be…
How the very first nervous systems evolved remains a fundamental open question. Molecular and genomic techniques have revolutionized our knowledge of the molecular ingredients behind this transition but not yet provided a clear picture of…
Neocortical neurons have thousands of excitatory synapses. It is a mystery how neurons integrate the input from so many synapses and what kind of large-scale network behavior this enables. It has been previously proposed that non-linear…
The fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience have a long history of fertile bi-directional interactions. On the one hand, important inspiration for the development of artificial intelligence systems has come from the study of…
For long it has been known that specific patterns of folding are necessary for an optimally functioning brain. For instance, lissencephaly and polymicrogyria can lead to severe mental retardation, short life expectancy, epileptic seizures,…
The last few million years on planet Earth have witnessed two remarkable phases of hominid development, starting with a phase of biological evolution characterised by rather rapid increase of the size of the brain. This has been followed by…
Local anaxonic neurons with graded potential release are important ingredients of nervous systems, present in the olfactory bulb system of mammalians, in the human visual system, as well as in arthropods and nematodes. We develop a neuronal…
We consider a Moran-type model of cultural evolution, which describes how traits emerge, are transmitted, and get lost in populations. Our analysis focuses on the underlying cultural genealogies; they were first described by Aguilar and…
Sex chromosomes have evolved repeatedly across the Tree of Life, yet their evolutionary fates differ strikingly. In sharp contrast to mammals and birds with degenerated, stable Y/W chromosomes, in most amphibians, teleosts, non avian…
The birth of new genes is an important motor of evolutionary innovation. Whereas many new genes arise by gene duplication, others originate at genomic regions that do not contain any gene or gene copy. Some of these newly expressed genes…
The neonatal cortical surface is known to be affected by preterm birth, and the subsequent changes to cortical organisation have been associated with poorer neurodevelopmental outcomes. Deep Generative models have the potential to lead to…
The long-term growth rate of populations in varying environments quantifies the evolutionary value of processing the information that biological individuals inherit from their ancestors and acquire from their environment. Previous models…
Modularisation, repetition, and symmetry are structural features shared by almost all biological neural networks. These features are very unlikely to be found by the means of structural evolution of artificial neural networks. This paper…
Evolutionary transitions occur when previously-independent replicating entities unite to form more complex individuals. Such transitions have profoundly shaped natural evolutionary history and occur in two forms: fraternal transitions…
The social brain hypothesis states that the relative size of the neocortex is larger for species with higher social complexity as a result of evolution. Various lines of empirical evidence have supported the social brain hypothesis,…
The exterior of the mammalian brain - the cerebral cortex - has a conserved layered structure whose thickness varies little across species. However, selection pressures over evolutionary time scales have led to cortices that have a large…
As children grow older, they develop an intuitive understanding of the physical processes around them. Their physical understanding develops in stages, moving along developmental trajectories which have been mapped out extensively in…
The evolution of spiking neurons and nervous systems in the late Ediacaran period simultaneously with the evolution of carnivores around 550 million years ago can be explained by the need for accurately timed decisions under an imminent…
Among the best-known facts of the brain are the contralateral visual, auditory, sensational, and motor mappings in the forebrain. How and why did these evolve? The few theories to this question provide functional answers, such as better…