CARTA: The Costs of Big Brains with Alex Pollen

Human brain expansion is often discussed in terms of the genetic and molecular innovations that drove uniquely human cognitive abilities. Yet evolution is fundamentally a process of tradeoffs. Disproportionate expansion of forebrain structures increases the demands placed on long-range connectivity, metabolism, and cellular maintenance, imposing costs that scale with brain size. Alex Pollen, associate professor of neurology at UC San Francisco, discusses using stem-cell-derived brain organoids to investigate the development of human-specific connectivity differences in dopaminergic neurons and to test whether these cells deploy compensatory mechanisms to cope with the metabolic and structural demands of large brains. His research findings support a model in which human brain evolution involves not only mechanisms driving greater computational capacity, but also the emergence of cellular adaptations that mitigate the costs of large, highly connected brains. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 41357]

You can listen to CARTA: The Costs of Big Brains with Alex Pollen online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

CARTA: The Costs of Big Brains with Alex Pollen is an episode from CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (Video) by UCTV.

This episode is 00:17:00 long.

This episode was published on Apr 15, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (Video) when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.