Human Brains "Evolve," Become Less Monkey-Like With Age
The brain regions that grow the most as we age are the same areas that expanded the most during evolution, 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.
"The parts of the [brain] that have grown the most to make us uniquely humans are the same regions that tend to grow the most postnatally," Hill said.
Hill and colleagues also compared the new human-brain scans with
