ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2007
Cellular scaling rules for primate brains.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 165 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
165 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 414 citations in OpenAlex.
- Socioecological complexity in primate groups and its cognitive correlates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Pooled it
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- Review
105 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Primates are usually found to have richer behavioral repertoires and better cognitive abilities than rodents of similar brain size. This finding raises the possibility that primate brains differ from rodent brains in their cellular composition. Here we examine the cellular scaling rules for primate brains and show that brain size increases approximately isometrically as a function of cell numbers, such that an 11x larger brain is built with 10x more neurons and approximately 12x more nonneuronal cells of relatively constant average size. This isometric function is in contrast to rodent brains, which increase faster in size than in numbers of neurons. As a consequence of the linear cellular scaling rules, primate brains have a larger number of neurons than rodent brains of similar size, presumably endowing them with greater computational power and cognitive abilities.
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