The human brain starts off with a bang and ends with a whimper, so it’s important to know how the brain works. A project that looked at more than 120,000 brain scans came to this conclusion: The brain grows quickly, then slows down a little, but it’s also very unique. Jon Hamilton, who works for NPR, has a lot more to say about this.
A BYLINE: JON HAMILTON: This is what he said: This is what he said: There were two young researchers who had a simple question at the start of the project: How does the brain change over time? This is because most studies that use MRI brain scans are only done on some people at one point in time. It turns out that the researchers came up with a way to do this.
Won’t it be great if we could combine all these other studies and all these different data sets to come up with some kind of ground truth and a language?
In the UK, Richard Bethlehem works at the University of Cambridge. Hamilton: That is Richard Bethlehem from the University of Cambridge. When he and Jakob Seidlitz from the University of Pennsylvania went to researchers who did brain scans, they asked if they could do something for them.
BETHLEHEM: This is what we want to do. Are you willing to help? Everyone said this looks great. I mean, I think we should do this.
It took a lot of work to turn more than 100 small studies into one big one for the two of them. They put together a team of people from all over the world and started. In the end, Bethlehem says they had brain scans from more than 100,000 people.
BETHLEHEM: The youngest person was about 15 or 16 weeks old when they were born. Then, I think, the oldest person we have is about 100 years old, or close to it.
Results of the study are in the journal Nature, and there are a lot of growth charts there. The brain has reached about 80% of its full size by age 3. He says that size varies a lot from person to person.
JAKOB SEIDLITZ: One of the first things we started to notice was how different the size of the brain is as it grows.
A lot of different structures and types of tissue grow in different ways in the brain, says Seidlitz.
Some of the different parts of the brain that make up the whole have really interesting dynamics that are not the same.
At around age 6, the volume of grey matter, which is made up of brain cells, is at its highest point. White matter, which shows the connections between cells, peaks at age 29. The study found that both white and grey matter start to go down after they reach their peak. After the age of 50, the decline in white matter starts to speed up. Dr. Aaron Alexander-Bloch, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, says that the study results are mostly for scientists, not parents, and that they should not be used by parents.
It’s Aaron Alexander-Bloch. Take your child to see the doctor right now and don’t ask where their brain is on a growth chart.
There aren’t many brain scans from people of different races and ethnicities in the current collection. But Alexander-Bloch says that in the future, brain growth charts could help doctors see signs of diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia before they get worse.
News: Jon Hamilton, NPR News, says this.
