How the flow and processing of information shapes the cerebrum
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Computational Biology, Evolutionary Studies, Neuroscience
- Keywords
- Scaling law, Evolution, Volume surface ratio, white matter volume, grey matter volume, Power relation, Brain
- Copyright
- © 2015 de Lussanet
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. How the flow and processing of information shapes the cerebrum. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e239v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.239v2
Abstract
The cerebrum of mammals spans a vast range of sizes and yet has a very regular structure. The amount of folding of the cortical surface and the proportion of white matter gradually increase with size, but the underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Here, two laws are derived to fully explain these cerebral scaling relations. The two general laws are derived from the notion that total processing power of the cortex is determined by the total cortical surface (i.e., the number of neurons), whereas the most efficient over-all flow of information is governed by the size of local networks (cortical columns). Since information is transferred by axonal connections which have a definite volume, a trade-off can be formulated from theoretical considerations between local, inter-gyral information transfer and long-range information transfer. It can be shown that this trade-off is governed by a single parameter describing the size of local networks, tlocal. Despite having just one free parameter, the first law fits the mammalian cerebrum better than any existing function, both across species and within humans. According to the second law, the scaling of white matter volume is also determined by the information principles. It follows that large cerebrums have much local processing and little global information flow. Moreover, paradoxically, a further increase in long-range connections would decrease the efficiency of information flow. These theoretical scaling principles help to compare the cerebrums across mammals regardless their size.
Author Comment
This is version 2 of an earlier preprint to PeerJ. This version corrects some typos and has the Supplement attached.
Supplemental Information
Data supplement. The data used for validating the scaling laws in form of an Excel table
At first the included measurements are printed, followed by the excluded ones including the reason for exclusion, and finally the species' mean values used for fitting. Cells with equations are marked in color.