The comparative connectome

是什么让人类独一无二？相对于我们的身体大小，我们的大脑是所有灵长类中最大的。这种巨大的大脑让我们主宰了地球，而我们的近亲大猩猩却被降级到非洲和印度尼西亚的小片地区。然而，当大脑变大时，大脑到底发生了什么变化，以及这与我们独特的人类行为，如口语、高级工具制造和两足行走之间的关系，仍然是一个谜。在这个项目中，我们试图通过将我们大脑的结构与一系列其他灵长类动物的大脑结构进行比较来解开这个谜团。如果我们想要了解是什么让我们的大脑不同，仅仅将它与另一种猿或猴子的大脑进行比较是不够的。我们在许多方面与其他灵长类动物不同，因此我们发现的任何差异可能与许多行为有关。如果我们想要了解不同的行为如何与我们大脑中的特定变化相关，我们必须将我们的大脑与一系列其他灵长类动物的大脑进行比较，每个灵长类动物的大脑都有不同的行为。因此，在这个项目中，我们的目标是绘制一系列不同灵长类动物的联系和大脑区域。我们将使用神经成像的新发展来扫描灵长类动物的大脑。我们将从在动物园生活过的动物身上获取大脑，这些动物死于与我们的研究完全无关的原因。这将使我们能够研究比以往任何时候都更多的物种，而不受任何伦理限制。通过使用神经成像，我们可以从每个大脑获得不同类型的信息，例如特定大脑区域有多大，它们位于哪里，以及它们是如何连接的。该项目将设在牛津大学的FMRIB中心。这位研究员和一名博士后研究助理将与FMRIB的MRI物理组合作进行大部分工作。我们将调查与我们认为人类特别发达的三种行为相关的大脑差异：语言、工具使用和一般决策。人类语言被认为是可能的，因为人类大脑的颞叶和额叶皮质之间有一系列新的联系。然而，最近有人提出，其中一些联系已经存在于大猩猩等类人猿身上，这意味着它们可能并不完全与语言有关。通过比较猴子、猿猴和人类之间的这些联系，我们可以测试这一想法，看看哪些联系是哪一类动物的特殊联系。人类工具制造在我们征服世界的过程中一直是必不可少的。人们认为，与其他动物相比，我们将更复杂的概念信息整合到我们的工具使用中。这可以通过两种方式发生，一种是通过在大脑中形成一条专门用于使用工具的新路径，另一种是通过阐述现有的到达和抓住猴子顶叶和运动前皮质的路径。我们将比较人类和猴子大脑顶叶和运动前皮质的连接路径，看看人类是否存在一条可能调节工具行为的新路径。人类大脑最独特的部分是前额叶皮质，它在人脑中非常大，与我们的决策能力相关。然而，这种大小是否是我们的大脑能够做出复杂行为的原因，还是因为我们与大脑其他部分的广泛联系为我们的额叶皮质带来了比猴子更多的信息，目前尚不清楚。我们只能通过比较不同物种的额叶皮质的大小和连接来研究这一点。这样，我们就可以看到大脑中额叶皮质的大小和连接之间的关系是基于其他灵长类动物，还是我们的情况有什么特殊之处。总之，这项工作不仅有助于我们了解我们与其他动物的不同之处，也有助于我们了解这些动物彼此之间的不同之处。

What makes humans unique? Relative to our body size, we have the largest brain of any primate. This massive brain allows us to dominate the planet, while our closest animal cousins, the great apes, are relegated to small patches of Africa and Indonesia. However, exactly what changed in our brain when it got bigger and how this relates to our uniquely human behaviors, such as spoken language, advanced tool-making, and bipedal walking, remains a mystery. In this project, we try to solve this mystery, by comparing the architecture of our brain to that of a range of other primates.If we want to understand what makes our brain different, it is not enough to compare it to that of just one other ape or monkey. We differ in many respects from other primates and thus any differences we find might find can be related to many behaviors. If we want to understand how different behaviors are related to particular changes in our brain, we have to compare our brain to that of a range of other primates, each with different behaviors. Therefore, in this project we aim to map the connections and brain regions of a range of different primates.We will use new developments in neuroimaging to scan the brain of primates post-mortem. We will obtain the brains from animals that have lived in zoos and that have died through causes completely unrelated to our research. This will allow us to study more species than ever before without any ethical constraints. By using neuroimaging we can obtain different types of information from each brain, such as how big specific brain regions are, where they are located, and how they are connected. This project will be based at the University of Oxford's FMRIB centre. The Fellow and a post-doctoral research assistant will conduct the majority of the work, in collaboration with the MRI Physics Group at FMRIB.We will investigate differences in brains related to three types of behavior that we believe are particularly well developed in humans: language, tool use, and general decision-making.Human language has been suggested to be possible due to a series of new connections between the temporal and frontal cortex of the human brain. However, it has recently been suggested that some of these connections are already present in great apes, such as gorillas, which mean they might not be exclusively related to language. By comparing these connections between monkeys, apes, and humans we can test this idea, and see which connections are special to which group of animals.Human tool-making has been essential in our conquest of the world. It is thought that we integrate much more complex conceptual information into our tool use than other animals do. This can have happened in two ways, by the formation of a new pathway in the brain specifically for using tools or by elaborating on existing pathways for reaching and grasping in the parietal and premotor cortex of monkeys. We will compare the pathways connecting parietal and premotor cortex in humans and monkeys and see whether there is a new pathway in humans that might mediate tool behavior.The most distinctive part of our human brain is the prefrontal cortex, which is very large in the human brain and has been related to our decision-making abilities However, whether this size is the reason that our brain is capable of complex behavior or whether it is due to the extended connections with the rest of the brain that bring our frontal cortex more information than in the monkey is unknown. We can only study this by comparing both the size and the connections of the frontal cortex across species. This way, we can see whether in our brain the relationship between size and connections of the frontal cortex is as predicated based on other primates or whether there is something special about our case.Together, this work will help us understand not only what makes us different from other animals, but also what makes these animals different from one another.