How does structural anatomy enable uniquely human brain function?

We want to understand how our brain evolved to support uniquely human cognition. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we will investigate how brain structure and function relate and how these relations differ in other primates. We will focus on the temporal lobe, a part of the brain which plays a key role in cognition and which strongly changed during evolution. We will employ novel analysis methods to describe brain anatomy and function on an individual subject-level, as opposed to conventional approaches that average across subjects. Importantly, our analyses aim to describe the brain?s organization along continuous gradients, rather than in terms of discrete brain areas with sharp borders. We will examine the temporal lobe by (1) relating MRI-based gradients to histological and genetic information, (2) relating structural aspects of the temporal lobe to brain function, and (3) by comparing these relationships in humans to those in non-human primates.