Biology subjects

Rilling, J. K.

Publications and source records attributed to Rilling, J. K..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Evolutionarily developed connections compromised in schizophrenia

The genetic basis and uniquely human character of schizophrenia has led to the notion of human brain evolution to have resulted in vulnerability to the disorder. We examined schizophrenia-related changes in brain connectivity in the context of evolutionary changes in human brain wiring by comparing in-vivo neuroimaging data from humans, chimpanzees and macaque monkeys. We find that evolutionary changes in human connectome organization overlap with the pattern of schizophrenia-related changes in brain connectivity, with connections evolutionary enhanced in the human brain showing significantly more involvement in schizophrenia pathology than connections shared between humans and non-human primates (effects shown in three independent patient-control datasets). Our findings suggest that the evolution of brain wiring in support of complex brain function in humans may have come at the cost of an increased vulnerability to brain dysfunction in disease.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

A Quantitative Assessment of Prefrontal Cortex in Humans Relative to Nonhuman Primates

Humans have the largest cerebral cortex among primates. A long-standing controversy is whether association cortex, particularly prefrontal cortex (PFC), is disproportionately larger in humans compared to nonhuman primates, as some studies report that human PFC is relatively expanded whereas others report uniform PFC scaling. We address this controversy using MRI-derived cortical surfaces of many individual humans, chimpanzees, and macaques. We present two parcellation-based PFC delineations based on cytoarchitecture and function and show that a previously used morphological surrogate (cortex anterior to the genu of the corpus callosum) substantially underestimates PFC extent, especially in humans. We find that the proportion of cortical gray matter occupied by PFC in humans is up to 86% larger than in macaques and 24% larger than in chimpanzees. The disparity is even greater for PFC white matter volume, which is 140% larger in humans compared to macaques and 71% larger than in chimpanzees.

neuroscience↗