Brain shape may influence thoughts and behavior, study finds

Your brain is more superficial than we thought.

Scientists from the University of Monash in Melbourne, Australia, have found that the shape of your brain could strongly influence how you think, feel and behave.

Previously, scientists thought neuron connectivity in the brain is what drives its function. However, recent research has found it could actually be affected by the brain’s grooves, contours and folds — rather than complex interconnections.

The study was published in Nature on Wednesday. Scientists examined the MRI scans of 255 individual’s brains, which took place as participants performed tasks like tapping their fingers or recalling a sequence of images.

The team then looked at 10,000 different maps of human brain activity taken from over 1,000 experiments conducted across the world, comparing how the shape of the brain was affected in different roles.

The study used a physics term, eigenmode, that describes the natural patterns of vibration in a system, applying this to brain activity.

“The best way to understand what eigenmodes are is to think of a violin,” co-lead author James Pang explained in a university press release.

“Every time you pluck its string, it vibrates with some pattern, and this pattern corresponds to the notes that you hear,” he said. “The preferred patterns of vibration are the eigenmodes of the string.”

Pang compared the brain’s geometry and the role it plays in brain function to how a ripple in a pond caused by a thrown rock is affected by the rock’s shape and size.

“The geometry is pretty important because it guides how the wave would look, which in turn relates to the activity patterns that you see when people perform different tasks,” Pang explained to NBC.

Pang also noted the theory could help scientists understand the effects of the brain activity associated with diseases like dementia, schizophrenia or depression — by considering models of brain shape.

“[They] are far easier to deal with than models of the brain’s full array of connections,” he added.