{"id":217282,"date":"2025-07-06T17:06:36","date_gmt":"2025-07-06T22:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/chinese-scientists-find-genetics-shapes-brains-balance-linked-to-mental-ability"},"modified":"2025-07-06T17:06:36","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T22:06:36","slug":"chinese-scientists-find-genetics-shapes-brains-balance-linked-to-mental-ability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/chinese-scientists-find-genetics-shapes-brains-balance-linked-to-mental-ability","title":{"rendered":"Chinese scientists find genetics shapes brain\u2019s balance linked to mental ability"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/chinese-scientists-find-genetics-shapes-brains-balance-linked-to-mental-ability2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There is extensive evidence that brain criticality \u2013 the balance between neural excitation and inhibition \u2013 enhances its information processing capabilities.<\/p>\n<p>But despite the significance of brain criticality and its potential influence on neurological and psychiatric disorders, the genetic basis of this state had been \u201clargely unexplored\u201d, according to researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences\u2019 biophysics and automation institutes. \u201cWe demonstrate that genetic factors significantly influence brain criticality across various scales, from specific brain regions to large-scale networks,\u201d the team said in their paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month.<\/p>\n<p>They also established a link between criticality and cognitive functions, suggesting a shared genetic foundation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese findings position brain criticality as a biological phenotype, opening broad avenues for exploring its implications in brain function and potential dysfunctions,\u201d the team wrote.<\/p>\n<p>Brain criticality is characterised by neuronal avalanches, or cascading bursts of neuron activity in brain networks.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the critical state, the brain exhibits scale-free dynamics, with avalanches observed across various scales ranging from local networks of individual neurons to the global network of interacting brain areas,\u201d the paper said.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/chinese-scientists-find-genetics-shapes-brains-balance-linked-to-mental-ability\">Continue reading \u201cChinese scientists find genetics shapes brain\u2019s balance linked to mental ability\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is extensive evidence that brain criticality \u2013 the balance between neural excitation and inhibition \u2013 enhances its information processing capabilities. But despite the significance of brain criticality and its potential influence on neurological and psychiatric disorders, the genetic basis of this state had been \u201clargely unexplored\u201d, according to researchers from the Chinese Academy of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":701,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/701"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}