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Essay: Brain volume and the acquisition of adaptive capacities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

By
Verne S. Caviness
Edited by
Kurt W. Fischer ,
Jane Holmes Bernstein  and
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Verne S. Caviness
Affiliation:
Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurology Massachusetts General Hospital; Joseph and Rose Kennedy Professor of Child Neurology and Mental Retardation Harvard Medical School
Kurt W. Fischer
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Jane Holmes Bernstein
Affiliation:
The Children's Hospital, Boston
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

Connection: Brain, language, and other human capacities develop in patterns shaped by both evolution and culturally defined experiences, including language and literacy. New tools for characterizing brain development provide means for analyzing development of different brain regions in relation to abilities such as speech and reading. Many classical neural imaging techniques assess the volume of particular brain regions in brains of people who have died, but newer techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging, assess volume in brains of living people. Because volumes of different brain tissues change in diverse ways when people die, the new techniques provide the first good data on brain volume of living brains. Many hypotheses about learning disorders involve differences in size of specific areas of brain tissue, such as regions for phonological analysis in many dyslexic children (Galaburda & Sherman; Paré-Blagoev; Benes & Paré-Blagoev, this volume). With data on volume in living brains being so recent, the principles relating brain volume to development, learning, and evolution remain to be determined. Evidence has already shown that different people show different volumes for the same brain areas, and that areas which share functioning seem to covary in their volume, even when they are in widely separated brain regions.

The Editors

There appear to be powerful constraints selected through evolution that act to set the total volume of neocortex to a narrow species-specific value (Filipek et al., 1994; Caviness et al., 1999). Within these constraints other mechanisms, operating through individual experience, adaptively modulate the volumes of specific brain regions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Mind, Brain, and Education in Reading Disorders , pp. 30 - 36
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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