What Makes Human Brains Different?

Those who have followed my writing and articles will know that this is a question that comes up regularly. Just what is different to human brain compared to other species?

The simple answers tend to be partly true but there are multiple answers and they don’t individually explain everything.

For example, we know that our prefrontal cortex — that part of the brain behind your forehead — is particularly large and developed in human beings. We also know that the regions between our cortices are larger in human beings and seem to be involved in many higher-order thinking processes. We also know that relatively speaking our small brain, the cerebellum that sits at the back of our head, is much larger in human beings.

That is just on size of regions but I also reported previously on a mysterious type of brain cell called Von Economo neurons. So mysterious that only one recording of this cell has been measured. These seem to be present in some species with higher intelligence such as chimpanzees, elephants, and dolphins.

Is there anything else?

Well, this is what these researchers around Shaojie Ma of Yale University set out to explore.

For this they focused on a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex because this is unique to primates…