Computer Vision News - August 2021

33 Katja Heuer I use computational neuroanatomy and phylogenetic comparative methods to study the evolution of the brain. I try to understand the origins of the variability that we observe, what is normal variability and what is pathology, and try to put that in the perspective of the human brain evolution. Thanks to collaboration with Roberto Toro who I’m working with in Paris and the Natural History Museum in Paris, I have access to a large collection of brains frommany, many different species, which gives me the opportunity to look at a large frame of brain evolution. We have a particular interest and focus on brain folding, to understand the role of brain folding in the organization of these complex structures in our brain that enable us to think, to feel, and to communicate. You spoke about the evolution of the brain. Are our brains becoming more sophisticated or less sophisticated? always trending toward the bigger brain. Are you telling me that our ancestors, 100 generations ago, had less developed brains than ours? No (and 100 generations ago is a very short time if we think in terms of brain evolution). I’m saying it can go both ways. For example, our own species long time ago, they had a larger brain than humans today. How do we quantify sophistication? What’s important is that there’s an adaptation for everything that we want to do in every species we observe. What is the best adaptation that we want to strive towards? More sophisticated and less sophisticated really depends on what we want to do. So, size does not matter? At a large scale, there is a slight correlation between the larger the brain That’s a very interes � ng ques � on, and there is no simple answer to that. We use compara � ve methods looking at >60 di ff erent primate species through evolu � on. We’ve seen that there is not one trend or one direc � on that, for example, brain volume will evolve. If you look at evolu � on, what we observe in primates is that you can observe brain volume decreasing in some branches, in primates that are s � ll living. In other branches, such as the humans, we see increases in volume. In other branches, we see a mix of both. Evolu � on is not