@howbrainsevolve

Evolutionary anthropologist interested in 'organs of extreme perfection and complication' (brains, mainly)

 Durham University
dur.ac.uk/staff/r-a-barton/
Joined November 2011
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That makes it about 3 - 0 to the cerebellum, versus frontal cortex nature.com/articles/s42003-0…

Anatomical differences in the brain organization between Australopithecus and early Homo based on...

Communications Biology - Anatomical differences in the brain organization between Australopithecus and early Homo based on computational neuroanatomy

nature.com
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I am joking of course. It is not a contest. But the overwhelming evidence now is complex patterns of change in different features at different times, not unidimensional progressive change 2/2
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The Visual Brain Hypothesis: my Perspective article in Science on a new paper by Richard Kay et al. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…. DM me for access if required

The visual brain hypothesis

Virtual models of primate crania support visual system influence on brain size

science.org
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Robert Barton retweeted
Shiry Ginosar@shiryginosarJun 8
Our @SimonsInstitute workshop on intelligence starts tomorrow (June 8)! We're bringing together researchers from AI, TOC, Psych, and Neuro to discuss two emerging themes: world models and social cognition. Join us in Berkeley or via livestream: simons.berkeley.edu/workshop…

Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

This workshop is dedicated to collaborative, interdisciplinary fundamental research at the intersection of the theory of computation, artificial intelligence, psychology, and neuroscience. The...

simons.berkeley.edu
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My talk on embodied cognitive evolution as part of the workshop on 'Topics in Intelligence at The Simons institute UC Berkeley: youtube.com/watch?v=gH9uGxXf…

Embodied cognitive evolution

Robert Barton (University of Durham)https://simons.berkeley.edu/ta...

youtube.com
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Macroevolutionary brain scaling is a microevolutionary metaphenomenon - full text of our new paper now available (open access) nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

Macroevolutionary brain scaling is a microevolutionary metaphenomenon

Nature Communications - Recent work has demonstrated that the relationship between brain and body mass across mammals is curvilinear. Here, the authors demonstrate this curvilinearity across 4679...

nature.com
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This has implications for how we interpret macroevolutionary patterns more generally, emphasising the need to account for intraspecific variation in order to understand variation across species
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One implication is that measures of relative brain size should be treated with extreme caution. The curvilinear pattern may explain why large bodied species appear relatively small brained when using linear models to characterise and account for scaling - they are large not dim
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What the Best Neuroscientists Already Know "The claim that neuroscience needs the humanities is not a plea from outside the field. Many of its most thoughtful practitioners have already reached this conclusion." stevenmintz.substack.com/p/t…
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Yes! nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
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A study co-authored by @howbrainsevolve of @AnthDurham1 gives new insight on how human hands and minds evolved together. 🧠The research is published in @CommsBio & was led by Dr Joanna Baker of @UniofReading 👉 brnw.ch/21wVcyc #DUresearch #DUinspire
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New paper: Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand nature.com/articles/s42003-0…

Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand

Communications Biology - Thumbs and brains coevolved in primates. Across living and extinct species, longer thumbs predict bigger brains, highlighting the neural cost of dexterity.

nature.com
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Pathway to Independence – an interview with Max Farnworth journals.biologists.com/dev/…

Pathway to Independence – an interview with Max Farnworth

Max Farnworth completed his PhD in Gregor Bucher's lab at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he explored how heterochrony shapes the evolution and development of insect brains. He then...

journals.biologists.com
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Humans may not have a uniquely specialised memory for sequences - it may be more to do with how tasks are culturally scaffolded and what they “mean” to participants. New paper royalsocietypublishing.org/d…

Humans may not have a uniquely enhanced sequence memory: sequence discrimination is facilitated by...

Abstract. Humans have been suggested to possess uniquely enhanced memory for sequences, based on sequence discrimination learning (SDL) tasks involving arb

royalsocietypublishing.org
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Interesting new study demonstrates "cerebellar connectivity to higher-order networks at birth, which generally strengthen with age, emphasizing the cerebellum’s early role in cognitive processing beyond sensory and motor functions nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

Functional development of the human cerebellum from birth to age five

Nature Communications - Using over 1,000 early childhood fMRI scans, the authors mapped cerebellocortical connectivity, revealing early integration with higher-order networks and age-related...

nature.com
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