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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…
The cerebrum of mammals spans a vast range of sizes and yet has a very regular structure. The amount of folding of the cortical surface and the proportion of white matter gradually increase with size, but the underlying mechanisms remain…
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…
The ``social brain hypothesis'' for the evolution of large brains in primates has led to evidence for the coevolution of neocortical size and social group sizes. Extrapolation of these findings to modern humans indicated that the equivalent…
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.…
Despite differences in brain sizes and cognitive niches among mammals, their cerebral cortices posses many common features and regularities. These regularities have been a subject of experimental investigation in neuroanatomy for the last…
Natural selection for terrestrial locomotion has yielded unifying patterns in the body shape of legged animals, often manifesting as scaling laws. One such pattern appears in the frontal aspect ratio. Smaller animals like insects typically…
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 material bases of information - paper, computer discs - usually scale with information quantity. Large quantities of information usually require large material bases. Conventional wisdom has it that human long-term memory locates within…
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…
Background: Human populations during the last 10,000 years have undergone rapid decreases in average brain size as measured by endocranial volume or as estimated from linear measurements of the cranium. A null hypothesis to explain the…
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,…
While it is relatively easy to imitate and evolve natural swarm behavior in simulations, less is known about the social characteristics of simulated, evolved swarms, such as the optimal (evolutionary) group size, why individuals in a swarm…
Although lagging behind classical computational neuroscience, theoretical and computational approaches are beginning to emerge to characterize different aspects of neuron-glial interactions. This chapter aims to provide essential knowledge…
Scale-free foraging patterns are widespread among animals. These may be the outcome of an optimal searching strategy to find scarce randomly distributed resources, but a less explored alternative is that this behaviour may result from the…
The geometry of the human cortex is complex and highly variable, with interactions between brain size, cortical folding, and age well-documented in the literature. However, few studies have explored how global brain size influences…
Understanding the growth and form of shapes is one of the most fundamental problems in biology. While many prior works have analyzed the beak shapes of Darwin's finches, other cranial features are relatively less explored. In this work, we…
The analysis of complex networks has revealed patterns of organization in a variety of natural and artificial systems, including neuronal networks of the brain at multiple scales. In this paper, we describe a novel analysis of the…
Anatomical connectivity imposes strong constraints on brain function, but there is no general agreement about principles that govern its organization. Based on extensive quantitative data we tested the power of three models to predict…
The aim of this study was to estimate the number of new cells and neurons added to the dentate gyrus across the lifespan, and to compare the rate of age-associated decline in neurogenesis across species. Data from mice (Mus musculus), rats…