A sedated young rhesus macaque (file photo).
Photograph by Lynn Johnson, National Geographic
Published July 12, 2010
Brain regions that grow the most outside the womb are the same areas that expanded the most during evolution from monkeys to humans, a new study says.
As the human brain matures, it expands in a "strikingly nonuniform" fashion, according to researchers who compared MRI scans of 12 infant brains with scans of 12 young adult brains. (See brain pictures.)The research revealed that brain regions involved in higher cognitive and executive processes—such as language and reasoning—grow about twice as much as regions associated with basic senses such vision and hearing, said study leader Jason Hill, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
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