The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Other Seminars

Speaker(s)

Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, associate director for communications, Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University

Speaker bio(s)

Suzana Herculano-Houzel is a Brazilian-born neuroscientist and associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where she studies what different brains are made of, what changes (or doesn't change) with different brain sizes, how much energy they cost, and what difference does all that make—especially in the context of how human brains compare to others. At the Laboratory of Comparative Neuroanatomy quantitative morphological approaches are used to investigate the diversity of the nervous system across animals, its evolution and developmental origins.

Talk Abstract: Why do some animals live only one year, and others over one hundred years? Why should we care? This talk will show that the popular view that longevity increases together with body size, as metabolic rate decreases, is wrong. Instead, both age at sexual maturity and maximal longevity scale uniformly across warm-blooded species simply as a function of the number of cortical neurons: the more the neurons, the more slowly that life history unfolds for a species. Implications for health, aging, cognitive evolution in general, and human evolution in particular, will be examined.

Open to

Public

Contact

Donovan Phua

Phone

(408) 680-9230

Sponsor

Donovan Phua
(408) 680-9230
dphua@rockefeller.edu