3rd Brain Seminar: Rogier B. Mars (Oxford Univ., UK)

The great promise of comparative neuroscience is to understand why brains differ by investigating the relations
between variations in the organization of different brains, their evolutionary history, and their current ecological
niche. For this approach to be successful, the organization of different brains needs to be quantifiable. I will
propose a general framework for understanding similarities and differences between the brains of primate species.
The approach uses white matter blueprints of the whole cortex based on a set of white matter tracts that can be
anatomically matched across species. The blueprints provide a common reference space that allows us to navigate
between brains of different species, identify homologuecortical areas, or to transform whole cortical maps from
one species to the other. Specializations are cast within this framework as deviations between the species' blueprints.
We illustrate how this approach can be used to compare human and macaque brains.