Timing as a mechanism of development and evolution in the cerebral cortex

One of the biggest mysteries in neurobiology concerns the mechanisms responsible for the diversification of the brain over different time scales i.e. during development and evolution. Subtle differences in the timing of biological processes during development, e.g. onset, offset, duration, speed and sequence, can trigger large changes in phenotypic outcomes. At the level of a single organism, altered timing of developmental events can lead to individual variability, as well as malformation and disease. At the level of phylogeny, there are known interspecies differences in the timing of developmental events, and this is thought to be an important factor that drives phenotypic variation across evolution, known as heterochrony. A particularly striking example of phenotypic variation is the evolution of human cognitive abilities, which has largely been attributed to the development of the mammalian-specific neocortex and its subsequent expansion in higher primates. Here, I review how the timing of different aspects of cortical development specifies developmental outcomes within species, including processes of cell proliferation and differentiation, neuronal migration and lamination, and axonal targeting and circuit maturation. Some examples of the ways that different processes might “keep time” in the cortex are explored, reviewing potential cell-intrinsic and -extrinsic mechanisms. Further, by combining this knowledge with known differences in timing across species, timing changes that may have occurred during evolution are identified, which perhaps drove the phylogenetic diversification of neocortical structure and function.