Human brain's special 🤯
There are downsides, too, to our special abilities. Chet Sherwood, an anthropologist and neuroscientist at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. says that humans undergo more drastic changes than other primates, such as a shrinkage of the cortex, owing to ageing —in part because we live so much longer.
But even the oldest great ape brains don’t seem to change as much as human brains do with age, he says.
And some conditions that seem specific to humans could be the price we pay for complexity, says Madeline Lancaster, who studies human brain development at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. “Even a small defect could have more dramatic consequences,” she says.
Scientists are interested in
- How gene variants act on neurons and the brain;
- How neural activity during development influences growth; and
- How parts of the brain other than the cortex might have changed to endow humans with our unique skills.
Although some changes to genes and cells undoubtedly make us who we are, it's too early to leap to any conclusions, says Alex Pollen, a geneticist who studies human brain evolution at the University of California San Francisco.
Some changes could just be side effects of other adaptations —for example, an increase in certain types of neuron so that brain regions could still communicate when the brain expanded.
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Empathy recommended