The cerebrum of large mammals is convoluted, whereas that of small mammals is smooth. Mota and Herculano-Houzel (Reports, 3 July 2015, p. 74) inspired a model on an old theory that proposed a fractal geometry. I show that their model reduces to the product of gray-matter proportion times the folding index. This proportional relation describes the available data even better than the fractal model.
Aquestion that has inspired generations of neuroanatomists is why our cerebrum is walnut-shaped-and why that of small mammals is lissencephalic (smooth), whereas that of the largest ones is even more strongly convoluted than our own. Mota and HerculanoHouzel claim to have solved this mystery (1).At least two earlier models exist that make quantitative predictions for the scaling of the mammalian cerebrum. Braitenberg (2) used a small data set and found that his model fits relatively small cerebra but not the human data. A larger data set (3) has confirmed that Braitenberg's model fails dramatically for all large brains. Zhang and Sejnowski (4) did validate their model using a large data set, with very good results. Unfortunately, a closer look shows that they assumed that the cortical thickness scales with cerebral size by a power law, which is not the case (5). It can be shown that correcting for this is fatal for Zhang and Sejnowski's model (6).Thus, it is great news if a scaling relation is found that does have a theoretical and quantitative biological underpinning. Mota and HerculanoHouzel developed a 25-year-old hypothesis that the folding pattern of the mammalian cerebrum follows a fractal geometry and scaling (7). Fractal geometry is the self-similarity over a large range of scales. Classical examples from nature are coastal lines (8) and clouds (9). Mota and HerculanoHouzel derived a scaling relation using a model that was based on the tension hypothesis by D. C. Van Essen (10).The authors did not acknowledge that the fractal hypothesis was first formulated by Hofman (7) [although they did use his data set (11)]; moreover, the tension model was only referred to in the supplement, and none of the existing quantitative models for cerebral scaling relations were cited.The scaling relation derived by Mota and Herculano-Houzel is ð1Þ kA 5=4