Nature versus nurture

It’s not rare that patients walk into my office thinking that genetics play an important role in their existing condition. If anything, sometimes, they consider the role of genetics to be absolute rather than relative. A recent study sheds some light on this nature versus nurture issue.

November 16th, 2015, researchers published Relaxed genetic control of cortical organization in human brains compared to chimpanzees. 218 human brains and 206 chimpanzee brains were studied. Two characteristics were compared: brain size and organization as related to genetic similarity.

The study did find that human and chimpanzee brain size were both greatly influenced by genetics. In contrast, the findings related to brain organization were different for chimpanzees and humans. Researchers found that chimpanzee brains were more strongly controlled by genes than that of human brains. This suggests that its environment extensively shapes the human brain, the researchers say.

This is good news for posturologists and their patients. This means that, even if you inherited from a brain that isn’t as powerful as you would care for, a lot can be done to power it up! Leave it to us, posturologists, to do just that!