Structural Variability Across the Primate Brain: A Cross-Species Comparison
Cerebral Cortex. 2017-10-13; 28(11): 3829-3841
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhx244
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1. Cereb Cortex. 2018 Nov 1;28(11):3829-3841. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhx244.
Structural Variability Across the Primate Brain: A Cross-Species Comparison.
Croxson PL(1), Forkel SJ(2)(3), Cerliani L(4)(5), Thiebaut de Schotten M(4)(5).
Author information:
(1)Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, 1 Gustave L
Levy Place, New York, NY, USA.
(2)Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, Department of Neuroimaging, Institute of
Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, London, UK.
(3)Natbrainlab, Department Forensics and Neurodevelopmental Sciences, Institute
of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, London, UK.
(4)Brain Connectivity and Behaviour group, Brain and Spine Institute, Paris,
France.
(5)Frontlab, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM), UPMC UMRS 1127,
Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Paris, France.
Comment in
Trends Cogn Sci. 2018 Mar;22(3):195-197.
A large amount of variability exists across human brains; revealed initially on a
small scale by postmortem studies and, more recently, on a larger scale with the
advent of neuroimaging. Here we compared structural variability between human and
macaque monkey brains using grey and white matter magnetic resonance imaging
measures. The monkey brain was overall structurally as variable as the human
brain, but variability had a distinct distribution pattern, with some key areas
showing high variability. We also report the first evidence of a relationship
between anatomical variability and evolutionary expansion in the primate brain.
This suggests a relationship between variability and stability, where areas of
low variability may have evolved less recently and have more stability, while
areas of high variability may have evolved more recently and be less similar
across individuals. We showed specific differences between the species in key
areas, including the amount of hemispheric asymmetry in variability, which was
left-lateralized in the human brain across several phylogenetically recent
regions. This suggests that cerebral variability may be another useful measure
for comparison between species and may add another dimension to our understanding
of evolutionary mechanisms.
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhx244
PMID: 29045561