Brain Size and Folding of the Human Cerebral Cortex
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
During evolution, the mammalian cerebral cortex has expanded disproportionately to brain volume. As a consequence, most mammals with large brains have profusely convoluted cortices. The human cortex is a good example of this trend, however, given the large variability in human brain size, it is not clear how cortical folding varies from the smallest to the largest brains. We analyzed cortical folding in a large cohort of human subjects exhibiting a 1.7-fold variation in brain volume. We show that the same disproportionate increase of cortical surface relative to brain volume observed across species can be also observed across human brains: the largest brains can have up to 20% more surface than a scaled-up small brain. We introduce next a novel local measure of cortical folding, and we show that the correlation between cortical folding and size varies along a rostro-caudal gradient, being especially significant in the prefrontal cortex. The expansion of the cerebral cortex, and in particular that of its prefrontal region, is a major evolutionary landmark in the emergence of human cognition. Our results suggest that this may be, at least in part, a natural outcome of increasing brain size.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it