From mouse to man—a bridge too far?

• 作者: Colette Dehay Henry Kennedy
• 来源期刊: 国家科学评论（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（7）
• 页码范围: 1258-1259
• 页数: 2页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwz225

摘要

The contemplation of our demise, particularly via the loss of cognitive functions, is challenging for our species.While we seek to understand our brain and its action as a particularly intriguing manifestation of the physical universe, society also seeks solutions to concrete problems and, here, understanding the brain as an intellectual exercise must be extended to being able to maintain and repair its function.Just how difficult this is becomes apparent when one considers the biological functions of brains.The enormous capacity for adaptation of the mammal class is reflected by an extraordinary range of brain sizes from cortices of 8 kilograms to a mere fraction of a gram in certain rodents.Changes in brain size directly impact on the architecture of the cortex [1].This poses an insoluble problem;a reductionist approach would lead us to assume that different sorts of mammalian brains are all doing the same thing, but the biological adaptation that they reflect argues against this notion [2].