Herculano-Houzel Suzana, Collins Christine E, Wong Peiyan, Kaas Jon H
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Feb 27;104(9):3562-7. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0611396104. Epub 2007 Feb 20.
Primates are usually found to have richer behavioral repertoires and better cognitive abilities than rodents of similar brain size. This finding raises the possibility that primate brains differ from rodent brains in their cellular composition. Here we examine the cellular scaling rules for primate brains and show that brain size increases approximately isometrically as a function of cell numbers, such that an 11x larger brain is built with 10x more neurons and approximately 12x more nonneuronal cells of relatively constant average size. This isometric function is in contrast to rodent brains, which increase faster in size than in numbers of neurons. As a consequence of the linear cellular scaling rules, primate brains have a larger number of neurons than rodent brains of similar size, presumably endowing them with greater computational power and cognitive abilities.
通常发现，与脑容量相似的啮齿动物相比，灵长类动物具有更丰富的行为模式和更好的认知能力。这一发现增加了灵长类动物大脑在细胞组成上与啮齿动物大脑不同的可能性。在这里，我们研究了灵长类动物大脑的细胞缩放规则，并表明脑容量随着细胞数量的增加大致呈等比增长，即一个大11倍的大脑是由多10倍的神经元和平均大小相对恒定的约12倍的非神经元细胞构成。这种等比函数与啮齿动物大脑形成对比，后者的脑容量增长速度比神经元数量增长速度更快。由于线性细胞缩放规则，灵长类动物大脑比类似大小的啮齿动物大脑拥有更多的神经元，这大概赋予了它们更强的计算能力和认知能力。
