A timeline of genetic changes in millions of years of human evolution shows that variants linked to higher intelligence appeared most rapidly around 500,000 years ago, and were closely followed by mutations that made us more prone to mental illness. The findings suggest a "trade-off" in brain evolution between intelligence and psychiatric issues, says Ilan Libedinsky at the Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Why did humans evolve big brains? "Mutations related to psychiatric disorders apparently involve part of the genome that also involves intelligence. So there's an overlap there," says Libedinsky. "[The advances in cognition] may have come at the price of making our brains more vulnerable to mental disorders."

Researchers working in The N.1 Institute for Health at the National University Of Singapore (NUS), led by Assistant Professor Camilo Libedinsky from NUS Psychology, and Senior Lecturer Shih-Cheng Yen from the Innovation and Design Programme at NUS Engineering, have discovered that a population of neurons in the brain's frontal lobe contain stable short-term memory information within dynamically-changing neural activity. This discovery may have far-reaching consequences in understanding how organisms have the ability to perform multiple mental operations simultaneously, such as remembering, paying attention and making a decision, using a brain of limited size. The results of this study were published in the journal Nature Communications on 1 November 2019. In the human brain, the frontal lobe plays an important role in processing short-term memories. Short-term memory has a low capacity to retain information.

Researchers working in The N.1 Institute for Health at NUS, led by Assistant Professor Camilo Libedinsky from NUS Psychology, and Senior Lecturer Shih-Cheng Yen from the Innovation and Design Programme at NUS Engineering, have discovered that a population of neurons in the brain's frontal lobe contain stable short-term memory information within dynamically-changing neural activity. This discovery may have far-reaching consequences in understanding how organisms have the ability to perform multiple mental operations simultaneously, such as remembering, paying attention and making a decision, using a brain of limited size. The results of this study were published in the journal Nature Communications on 1 November 2019. In the human brain, the frontal lobe plays an important role in processing short-term memories. Short-term memory has a low capacity to retain information.