COMPARATIVE MAMMALIAN BRAIN COLLECTION

A simple theory may explain the various degrees of folding seen in mammalian
brains, ranging from the smooth marmoset's brain (right column, top) to the craggy
human's (right column, bottom).

Your brain is like a wad of paper

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By Adrian Cho (/author/adrian-cho)

2 July 2015 2:30 pm
(/biology/2015/07/your-brain-wad-paper#disqus_thread)

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Whether they're from humans, whales, or elephants, the brains of many

mammals are covered with elaborate folds. Now, a new study shows that
the degree of this folding follows a simple mathematical relationship
called a scaling lawthat also explains the crumpling of paper. That
observation suggests that the myriad forms of mammalian brains arise not
from subtle developmental processes that vary from species to species,
but rather from the same simple physical process.
In biology, it rare to find a mathematical relationship that so tightly fits all
the data, say Georg Striedter, a neuroscientist at the University of
California, Irvine. "They've captured something," he says. Still, Striedter
argues that the scaling law describes a pattern among fully developed
brains and doesn't explain how the folding in a developing brain happens.
The folding in the mammalian brain serves to increase the total area of the

cortex, the outer layer of gray matter where the neurons reside. Not all
mammals have folded cortices. For example, mice and rats have smoothsurfaced brains and are "lissencephalic." In contrast, primates, whales,
dogs, and cats have folded brains and are "gyrencephalic."
For decades, scientists have struggled to relate the amount of folding in a
species' brain to some other characteristic. For example, although animals
with tiny brains tend to have smooth ones, there is no clean relationship
between the amount of foldingmeasured by the ratio of the total area of
the cortex to the exposed outer surface of the brainand brain mass.
Make a plot of folding versus brain mass for various species and the data
points fall all over and not on a unified curve. Similarly, there is no clean
relationship between the amount of folding and the number of neurons,
the total area of the cortex, or the thickness of the cortex.
But now, Suzana Herculano-Houzel and Bruno Motaa neuroscientist
and physicist, respectively, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in
Brazilhave found a mathematical relation for folding in mammals' brains
that appears to be universal. Using data for 62 different species, the duo
plotted the area of cortex times the square root of its thickness versus of
the exposed area of the brain. All the data points fell on a single universal
curve (http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaa9101)
for both lissencephalic and gyrencephalic speciesas the researchers
report online today in Science. And the curve showed that the
combination of total area and thickness grew with the exposed outer area
raised to the power 1.25just as the area of a circle grows with its radius
raised to the power 2.
It may sound complicated, but that universal relationship is the same one
that describes crumpled wads of paperas Herculano-Houzel showed by
scrunching up sheets of paper of different sizes and thickness at her
dining room table and measuring their surface areas. The relationship
comes about because the bent-up paper settles into the configuration that
minimizes its energy. So presumably, in folding, the cortex also simply
settles into the configuration of least mechanical energy.
But Striedter argues that the analogy with crumpling paper is not
completely reliable. The paper is exposed to external forces applied by the
hands, he notes, whereas the forces in the cortex presumably arise
internally. Scientists have yet to determine how those forces arise and the
folding occurs, says Striedter, who co-authored a commentary on the
paper (http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aac6531)

that also appears in Science. For example, he says, some models suggest
that the growing cortex folds as its outer layer grows faster than its inner
layer. "The scaling relationship is one thing," Strieder says. "The
mechanism of how you get there is another."
However, Herculano-Houzel sees it differently. At every stage of
development, the growing cortex is indeed subject to the external force of
the cranium, she says. So as the cortex grows in the confined space, it
must crumple, and at every stage of development the scaling relationship
should hold, she argues. That prediction can be tested in, say, developing
pigs, Herculano-Houzel says, which is what she intends to do next. If the
scaling relationship holds at all stages of development, she says, then
there is no need for another mechanism to explain the folding.
Posted in Biology (/category/biology) , Brain & Behavior (/category/brainbehavior) , Math (/category/math) , Physics (/category/physics)
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DOI: 10.1126/science.aac8797