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human brain

Previously unknown human brain region identified

Could be unique to humans: It turns out we humans may have an extra type of thinky bit that isn’t found in other primates. A previously unknown brain structure was identified while scientists carefully imaged parts of the human brain for an upcoming atlas on brain anatomy. Neuroscientist George Paxinos and his team at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) have named their discovery the endorestiform nucleus – because it is located within (endo) the inferior cerebellar peduncle (also called the restiform body). It’s found at the base of the brain, near where the brain meets the spinal cord. This area is involved in receiving sensory and motor information from our bodies to refine our posture, balance and movements.Tessa Koumoundouros, “Neuroscientists Have Read More ›

Whatta headline! Early man was “total mean girl”

William von Hippel, an evolutionary psychologist promoting a book, explains how we got here: Social connection and its middle-school messiness assured our survival — more than harnessing fire or developing opposable thumbs. Von Hippel writes that a series of “social leaps” — or movements forward in the way we connect with our fellow man — made our brains bigger, our connections stronger and our long-term survival certain. We learn about the importance of bitchiness and gossip. Our ability to lie and deceive also evolved. Though many members of the animal kingdom use deception, outright lying requires Theory of Mind, as one needs to comprehend what someone is thinking in order to manipulate them. Evolutionary scientists say this is a distinctly Read More ›

Life forms are not machines and neurons are not neural networks

From Mind Matters: Much popular literature leaves the impression that living organisms are machines or even billions of them linked together. For example, at Medium, we learn, Brains receive input from the outside world, their neurons do something to that input, and create an output. That output may be a thought (I want curry for dinner); it may be an action (make curry); it may be a change in mood (yay curry!). Whatever the output, that “something” is a transformation of some form of input (a menu) to output (“chicken dansak, please”). And if we think of a brain as a device that transforms inputs to outputs then, inexorably, the computer becomes our analogy of choice… … But organisms differ Read More ›

Can culture explain why brains have become bigger?

From ScienceDaily: Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which have tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive: that is, a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Building on existing research on learning, Muthukrishna and colleagues analytically and computationally modeled the predictions of the cultural brain hypothesis and found that this theory not only explains these increases in brain size, but a variety of other relationships with group size, learning strategies, knowledge and life history. The theory relies on the idea that brains expand to store and manage more information. Brains expand in response Read More ›

Researchers: Starchy food may have aided human brain development

From ScienceDaily: A perennial topic in human evolution is, what gave humans an advantage? A logical response to the question is: Name just about anything and someone will make a case out of it. A little while ago, it was meat.  This time, it’s starch. People with more copies of the AMY1 gene — and corresponding higher concentrations of the amylase enzyme in their saliva — were found to digest starchy carbohydrates faster. They also displayed a higher blood glucose response to foods containing starch such as bread and pasta, but not sugary foods. As sugary foods shouldn’t be digested by amylase, the lack of an association indicates the difference in starch digestion observed was due to differences in the enzyme Read More ›

New research: Human brains do not differ much from reptile brains

These findings don’t show that reptiles are secretly smart. They mainly deepen the mystery of the human mind, which traverses regions unknown to any of them without the brain being that much different. Read More ›

Unique type of cell found in human brain: rosehip neurons

At least, it hasn’t been seen in other life forms. From ScienceDaily: Tamás and University of Szeged doctoral student Eszter Boldog dubbed these new cells “rosehip neurons” — to them, the dense bundle each brain cell’s axon forms around the cell’s center looks just like a rose after it has shed its petals, he said. The newly discovered cells belong to a class of neurons known as inhibitory neurons, which put the brakes on the activity of other neurons in the brain. The study hasn’t proven that this special brain cell is unique to humans. But the fact that the special neuron doesn’t exist in rodents is intriguing, adding these cells to a very short list of specialized neurons that Read More ›

Human evolution researchers: Social challenges decreased brain size

From evolutionary biologist Mauricio Gonzalez Forero at The Conversation: Most animals have brains in proportion to their body size – species with larger bodies often have larger brains. But the human brain is almost six times bigger than expected for our bodies. This is puzzling, as the brain is very costly – burning 20% of the body’s energy while accounting for only 4% of its mass. As evolution tends to remove waste, how come we evolved such large, energy-consuming brains? There are many different ideas out there, with the dominant hypothesis suggesting that challenging social interactions were the driving force. But our new study, published today in Nature, finds evidence against this idea and shows that human brain expansion was Read More ›