Neuro-evolutionary evidence for a universal fractal primate brain shape

TL;DR

This paper reveals that primate brains share a universal fractal shape across species, enabling more precise morphological analysis and potential biomarkers for aging and neurological conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a universal multi-scale fractal model of primate cortices, unifying diverse shapes and sizes across species and demonstrating scale-dependent effects of aging.

Findings

All primate cortices follow a common fractal morphometric trajectory.

Cortical shapes can be described as nested folds of varying sizes.

A scale-dependent increase in aging effect size was observed.

Abstract

The cerebral cortex displays a bewildering diversity of shapes and sizes across and within species. Despite this diversity, we present a universal multi-scale description of primate cortices. We show that all cortical shapes can be described as a set of nested folds of different sizes. As neighbouring folds are gradually merged, the cortices of 11 primate species follow a common scale-free morphometric trajectory, that also overlaps with over 70 other mammalian species. Our results indicate that all cerebral cortices are approximations of the same archetypal fractal shape with a fractal dimension of $d_f=2.5$. Importantly, this new understanding enables a more precise quantification of brain morphology as a function of scale. To demonstrate the importance of this new understanding, we show a scale-dependent effect of ageing on brain morphology. We observe a more than four-fold increase in effect size (from 2 standard deviations to 8 standard deviations) at a spatial scale of approximately 2 mm compared to standard morphological analyses. Our new understanding may therefore generate superior biomarkers for a range of conditions in the future.