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brain evolution

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Food for thought: recipe for bigger brains

There are hundreds of species of primates spread all across the globe that vary greatly in both brain size and intelligence. At the extremes, the great apes (our closest living relatives) have brains that are slightly larger than those of newborn humans, while mouse lemurs... click to read more

  • Alexandra R DeCasien | PhD student at Department of Anthropology, New York University, New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology, New York, USA
Views 5380
Reading time 4 min
published on Sep 4, 2017
The mutation that allowed our brain to grow

During human evolution, one of the most remarkable events was the expansion of the upper layer of the brain: the so-called neocortex. This event took place about 2 million years ago and allowed us to develop the cognitive abilities that characterize modern day humans. In... click to read more

  • Reinier Prosee | PhD student at Department of Molecular Biology, Section of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Views 6865
Reading time 4 min
published on Aug 24, 2017
Where is the Engram?

The author Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987.

The human brain is composed of over 100 billion electrically-active brain cells (called neurons), and what makes the neuron a special cell type is that it sends out extensions (known as axons) that... click to read more

  • Tomás Ryan | Research Scientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • Susumu Tonegawa | Professor at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Views 14158
Reading time 4 min
published on Dec 14, 2015