Snipped from Boston.com.

Now this is very interesting! Researchers are starting to unveil the reasons for our wrinkled brains. Could this mean a new etiology for the mental illnesses that still lack explanation?

Autism and schizophrenia are some of the most mysterious conditions of the human mind. We have discovered a little of this, a little of that, but we can’t put it all together to form a holistic explanation. We are still left with sketchy theories and incomplete knowledge. This new research into our folding and wrinkling brain may be the piece that puts it all together, or maybe not. Either way, it is exciting news.

Here is a small portion of the article:

Some intriguing work has been done examining schizophrenia. In a 2004 study, researchers discovered that schizophrenics have different folding patterns in one particular region: Broca’s area, which is involved in language processing and production, mental tasks that are disrupted in schizophrenia.

“It was one of those rare findings that made perfect sense,’’ said Bruce Fischl, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and coauthor of the study. Additional studies have found further irregularities in the folding of schizophrenics’ frontal lobes, the seat of high-level cognitive functions.
Other research has shown that autistic children seem to have overly folded brains. This extra folding is significant enough that it actually increases the surface area of the cortex, said Antonio Hardan, a child psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., who conducted the research.
The finding is consistent with earlier discoveries that children with autism have bigger brains than their peers.

Read Full Article Here!