Developmental Neurogenomics Unit, National Institute of Mental Health, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, Oxford University, UK.
Science. 2018 Jun 15;360(6394):1222-1227. doi: 10.1126/science.aar2578. Epub 2018 May 31.
Brain size variation over primate evolution and human development is associated with shifts in the proportions of different brain regions. Individual brain size can vary almost twofold among typically developing humans, but the consequences of this for brain organization remain poorly understood. Using in vivo neuroimaging data from more than 3000 individuals, we find that larger human brains show greater areal expansion in distributed frontoparietal cortical networks and related subcortical regions than in limbic, sensory, and motor systems. This areal redistribution recapitulates cortical remodeling across evolution, manifests by early childhood in humans, and is linked to multiple markers of heightened metabolic cost and neuronal connectivity. Thus, human brain shape is systematically coupled to naturally occurring variations in brain size through a scaling map that integrates spatiotemporally diverse aspects of neurobiology.
大脑在灵长类动物进化和人类发育过程中的变化与不同脑区比例的变化有关。在正常发育的人类中，个体大脑大小的差异几乎可以达到两倍，但这对大脑组织的影响仍知之甚少。利用来自 3000 多人的体内神经影像学数据，我们发现，与边缘系统、感觉和运动系统相比，较大的人类大脑在分布式额顶皮质网络和相关皮质下区域表现出更大的面积扩张。这种面积再分配再现了跨越进化的皮质重塑，在人类中表现为幼儿期，并与多个代谢成本和神经元连接增加的标志物相关。因此，人类大脑的形状通过一个整合了神经生物学时空多方面的缩放图与大脑大小的自然变化系统地联系在一起。
