The human cerebral cortex contains 16 billion neurons, wired together into arcane, layered circuits responsible for everything from our ability to walk and talk to our sense of nostalgia and drive to dream of the future. In the course of human evolution, the cortex has expanded as much as 1,000-fold, but how this occurred is still a mystery to scientists.
Now, researchers at UC San Francisco have succeeded in mapping the genetic signature of a unique group of stem cells in the human brain that seem to generate most of the neurons in our massive cerebral cortex.
The new findings, published Sept. 24, 2015 in the journal Cell, support the notion that these unusual stem cells may have played an important role in the remarkable evolutionary expansion of the primate brain.
