6 ms·

Newly Discovered 'Rose Hip' Neurons May Be Unique To Humans

103 points by snapspans 8y ago

ComputerGuru 8y ago
I feel discoveries like this that can either be a promising lead that turns out to be nothing (e.g. mice don’t have these neurons but other animals do) or could wind up being the single biggest discovery in the study of sentience ever are the perfect example of what real science is like.
- newsbinator 8y ago
  When has it ever been the latter?
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Penicillin was pretty big. Amusing discovery too. As penicillin is fundamentally a derivative of the blue-green mold that can appear on decaying matter, the idea of injecting it into yourself to combat bacterial infections is something that few would believe. It only began to be regularly used some 14 years after its discovery, even the discover rapidly shared and published his findings. On the other hand, maybe these discoveries are a bit different. It seems the big discoveries often come in the form of falsifying previously held beliefs rather than immediately introducing novel 'actionable' discoveries. For instance Mercury's orbit goes off by a pesky 0.01 degree change per century that could not be accounted for by Newtonian planetary mechanics. That falsification is perhaps at least part of the long chain of events that would culminate in the discovery of relativity.
Camillo 8y ago
> A scientist named Gábor Tamás and members of his lab were studying brain cells called inhibitory neurons, which act like the brakes in a car. They tell other brain cells when to slow down. Is this "explain it like I'm five" passage really necessary? Surely any adult would understand what an inhibitory neuron does from the name alone. Would a writer feel the need to explain the meaning of the word inhibit? Inhibition? Uninhibited? And if they did, would they do so in such childish terms?
- Jedd 8y ago
  Not necessarily. I self-assess as 'fairly smart', but my neurological understanding is pretty poor, and inhibitory neuron may mean a neuron that inhibits other neurons, or a neuron that inhibits something else entirely. If that's to 'slow down' the pace of neuron activity or to actually suppress it (ie. inhibit it) isn't 100% clear from the name, either.
- MichaelBurge 8y ago
  Does an inhibitory neuron prevent other neurons from firing, negate the effect of their firing, or slow them down?
  - nonbel 8y ago
    It can do any of those or the opposite. The effect of the signals from one neuron depend on the properties of the receiving neuron. Ie, the same neurotransmitter released can be "excitatory" to neighboring neurons in one case and "inhibitory" in the next: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452214006411 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645221...
hyperion2010 8y ago
While I am usually sceptical of anything that has even a whiff of human exceptionalism, this is a fascinating result. Ed is extremely interested in and well versed in comparative neurobiology, and despite the deathgrip that Allen's PR team has on all external communication, the fact that he seems to have approved of the spin is a good sign. Second, the primary outstanding question that I have is whether we have actually sampled the population in L1 sufficiently in other species. Another (maybe unpublished?) result that has come out of Ed's group (and collaborators) is that human neurons are extremely metabolically robust. They are almost like turtle neurons, they can be patched for extended periods of time and live for days to weeks. When compared to rodents this means that this cell type might simply be living long enough to see it, and dying too quickly/being too unhealthy to patch in rodents. The transcriptomic data suggests that this might not be the case, but the results from the sequencing of marmoset cell types are not in yet, and good luck getting this data for a great ape.
- buntress 8y ago
  Once an aspect of human exceptionalism is noted, I would imagine one would look at chimpanzees as the next analogue, and not mice. Nearest neighbor, top down, based on genetic similarity. If you’ve got something, and it seems that it’s only detected in humans, aren’t chimpanzees (or may other great apes) the gold standard for human comparative biology? Then follow the chain, back through old world monkeys, before reaching rodentia.
  - nonbel 8y ago
    I had some old pictures of stained rodent brains and saw something looked qualitatively like what they described in the first (and only) image I checked. Since they dont give any definite criteria for me to compare against, what can I do?
    - hyperion2010 8y ago
      Well, they give about the most definite criteria they can given current techniques, which is the transcriptomic profile. In fig 2e [0] they also give a bouton density profile. If you still have the pictures and have neurogliaform and basket cells stained with the same technique, you should be able to determine whether you are in the ballpark. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0205-2/figures/2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0205-2/figures/2
Someone 8y ago
”It is still possible that these newly identified neurons will also be found the brains of primates like monkeys or chimps, Lein says.” Possible and, in my universe, quite a bit more likely than that these cells are “unique to humans” (cursorily reading the paper, these scientists didn’t even look for this type of cell in anything but humans, but only claim that, if rodents had them, they would have been found there, given the amount of time spent looking at rodent brains) Disclaimer: I’m not a neuroscientist (but that’s an advantage, too. I don’t have to keep hunting for funding. That removes incentives to sensationalize results)
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  By that logic, if humans had them, they would have been found before now, given the amount of time spent looking at human brains. It seems you have to be looking in the right place, in the right way, for the right thing. But it's wrong to knock a new discovery - even if not unique to humans, it's still a discovery. Let's celebrate the feature for itself, not benefits that might follow.
  - stult 8y ago
    There's probably been orders of magnitude more time spent analyzing rodent brains, simply because there is an effectively unlimited quantity available and an extremely limited quantity of human brains available. Essentially all invasive human brain studies are preceded by animal model studies (usually starting with rodents before proceeding to "higher" animals if that's called for), but conversely not all animal model studies result in a human follow up. Meaning a hell of a lot more rodent brains get put under the microscope. So in general you would expect to find them in rodents first, if the probability of serendipitous discovery is purely a function of time spent conducting unrelated analyses.
    - kanzure 8y ago
      I wouldn't expect the number of human autopsies to be more than a few million over the entire history of the human species. Nobody looks at human brains. It's a huge problem.
jtbayly 8y ago
But we’re totally going to be able to simulate the human brain and upload consciousness into a computer, right?
- bitL 8y ago
  What if singularity already happened and we are its result?
  - newsbinator 8y ago
    Then we could probably make it happen again, for us.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  eventually
phkahler 8y ago
"These types of cells [inhibitory neurons] are extremely important," he says. And when there's dysfunction in them, he says, that can "directly be linked to different types of neuropsychiatric disease, like schizophrenia." That's a really bold claim with nothing in the article backing it up. If I put my thinking cap on, perhaps there is an established link between failure of inhibitory neurons and neuropsychiatric disease (this would not surprise me but it's not called out in the article), but even if that has been established it's a big leap to assign so much importance to this particular variant of inhibitory neuron that has just been discovered (in dead people) and is barely understood.
- bognition 8y ago
  The claim isn't that bold, there is a well established link between inhibitory neuron disfunction and neuropsychiatric disorders. I think you're mis-reading the comment. The passage says that inhibitory neurons are important, not the 'Rose Hip' neurons.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    You are correct. I interpreted that as saying these particular cells are important, not the general class of inhibitory neurons. The article also didn't (unless I missed it) spell out the connection between inhibitory activity and neuropsychiatric disorders. I had not heard of the relation between lack of inhibitory action and such disorders, but I know glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter and its deficiency can play a role in such disorders. Now I know of a more general framework to put that into. So this all make sense now, but it wasn't clear to me strictly from the article. Thanks.
vinceguidry 8y ago
I'm quite curious as to what provides for the kinds of mental 'structures' that make for so much of our inner lives. This is an old blog post, and seems to have lost the formatting, but this is the concept I'm pointing to: https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/07/31/pillar-management/ https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/07/31/pillar-management... The conclusions we come to, wind up constraining the thought space of our future thoughts. I believe this cognitive process demands explanation.
ilaksh 8y ago
I read the article, and it seems like it could be an important difference for some types of biology research, if they actually verify it isn't found in other species that they haven't checked yet. But my initial reaction to the headline was about AI research. My personal belief is that if you are looking at biology for help creating more powerful general purpose AI (AGI or "strong AI"), the idea that humans are special is actually mostly wrong and is counter-productive. For example there were many earlier efforts that emphasized reproducing the more rational aspects of human cognition (things animals seemed unable to do), but those turned out to be dead ends for AGI. Computers can do automated mathematical problem solving or proofs or play chess much better than humans, but it turns out that much of what people do doesn't have cut-and-dried rules that we can just enter in. Most, if not all of the capabilities that have been more difficult to achieve in AI are shared between humans and animals. If anyone has had a pet they might have noticed some abilities that may or may not have seemed particularly smart at that time. But when you start to look at it from the perspective of reproducing those abilities in robots, no one has come close. And those capabilities are shared with humans and can be mapped to higher-level abilities. For example, start with the advanced vision and motor systems that work together in the average house cat. Add in the ability to communicate and coerce humans into providing fresh food and water at will (ok, my cat was spoiled). The desire and ability of the cat to play in a slightly creative way -- my cat would look at me, arch her back, puff up her tail, tilt her head, as a clear communication that she wanted me to play chase with her. Then she would run and find a new place to hide. Or she would run up and smack me with both paws on the ankle at the same time, check that I had noticed and then run away -- another invitation to play. (Coincidentally, tag was also by far my nephew's favorite game when he was little.) I guess I don't really have the motivation today to make a really in-depth and convincing argument here. But at least consider making artificial cats before you make artificial humans. Even if you don't agree that it is a big step towards reproducing human abilities. Because cats _can_ be pretty great, but litter boxes are disgusting.

103 points by snapspans 8y ago

I feel discoveries like this that can either be a promising lead that turns out to be nothing (e.g. mice don’t have these neurons but other animals do) or could wind up being the single biggest discovery in the study of sentience ever are the perfect example of what real science is like.

newsbinator 8y ago
When has it ever been the latter?
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Penicillin was pretty big. Amusing discovery too. As penicillin is fundamentally a derivative of the blue-green mold that can appear on decaying matter, the idea of injecting it into yourself to combat bacterial infections is something that few would believe. It only began to be regularly used some 14 years after its discovery, even the discover rapidly shared and published his findings. On the other hand, maybe these discoveries are a bit different. It seems the big discoveries often come in the form of falsifying previously held beliefs rather than immediately introducing novel 'actionable' discoveries. For instance Mercury's orbit goes off by a pesky 0.01 degree change per century that could not be accounted for by Newtonian planetary mechanics. That falsification is perhaps at least part of the long chain of events that would culminate in the discovery of relativity.

Camillo 8y ago

> A scientist named Gábor Tamás and members of his lab were studying brain cells called inhibitory neurons, which act like the brakes in a car. They tell other brain cells when to slow down. Is this "explain it like I'm five" passage really necessary? Surely any adult would understand what an inhibitory neuron does from the name alone. Would a writer feel the need to explain the meaning of the word inhibit? Inhibition? Uninhibited? And if they did, would they do so in such childish terms?

Jedd 8y ago
Not necessarily. I self-assess as 'fairly smart', but my neurological understanding is pretty poor, and inhibitory neuron may mean a neuron that inhibits other neurons, or a neuron that inhibits something else entirely. If that's to 'slow down' the pace of neuron activity or to actually suppress it (ie. inhibit it) isn't 100% clear from the name, either.
MichaelBurge 8y ago
Does an inhibitory neuron prevent other neurons from firing, negate the effect of their firing, or slow them down?
- nonbel 8y ago
  It can do any of those or the opposite. The effect of the signals from one neuron depend on the properties of the receiving neuron. Ie, the same neurotransmitter released can be "excitatory" to neighboring neurons in one case and "inhibitory" in the next: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452214006411 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645221...

hyperion2010 8y ago

While I am usually sceptical of anything that has even a whiff of human exceptionalism, this is a fascinating result. Ed is extremely interested in and well versed in comparative neurobiology, and despite the deathgrip that Allen's PR team has on all external communication, the fact that he seems to have approved of the spin is a good sign. Second, the primary outstanding question that I have is whether we have actually sampled the population in L1 sufficiently in other species. Another (maybe unpublished?) result that has come out of Ed's group (and collaborators) is that human neurons are extremely metabolically robust. They are almost like turtle neurons, they can be patched for extended periods of time and live for days to weeks. When compared to rodents this means that this cell type might simply be living long enough to see it, and dying too quickly/being too unhealthy to patch in rodents. The transcriptomic data suggests that this might not be the case, but the results from the sequencing of marmoset cell types are not in yet, and good luck getting this data for a great ape.

buntress 8y ago
Once an aspect of human exceptionalism is noted, I would imagine one would look at chimpanzees as the next analogue, and not mice. Nearest neighbor, top down, based on genetic similarity. If you’ve got something, and it seems that it’s only detected in humans, aren’t chimpanzees (or may other great apes) the gold standard for human comparative biology? Then follow the chain, back through old world monkeys, before reaching rodentia.
- nonbel 8y ago
  I had some old pictures of stained rodent brains and saw something looked qualitatively like what they described in the first (and only) image I checked. Since they dont give any definite criteria for me to compare against, what can I do?
  - hyperion2010 8y ago
    Well, they give about the most definite criteria they can given current techniques, which is the transcriptomic profile. In fig 2e [0] they also give a bouton density profile. If you still have the pictures and have neurogliaform and basket cells stained with the same technique, you should be able to determine whether you are in the ballpark. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0205-2/figures/2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0205-2/figures/2

Someone 8y ago

”It is still possible that these newly identified neurons will also be found the brains of primates like monkeys or chimps, Lein says.” Possible and, in my universe, quite a bit more likely than that these cells are “unique to humans” (cursorily reading the paper, these scientists didn’t even look for this type of cell in anything but humans, but only claim that, if rodents had them, they would have been found there, given the amount of time spent looking at rodent brains) Disclaimer: I’m not a neuroscientist (but that’s an advantage, too. I don’t have to keep hunting for funding. That removes incentives to sensationalize results)

hyperpallium 8y ago
By that logic, if humans had them, they would have been found before now, given the amount of time spent looking at human brains. It seems you have to be looking in the right place, in the right way, for the right thing. But it's wrong to knock a new discovery - even if not unique to humans, it's still a discovery. Let's celebrate the feature for itself, not benefits that might follow.
- stult 8y ago
  There's probably been orders of magnitude more time spent analyzing rodent brains, simply because there is an effectively unlimited quantity available and an extremely limited quantity of human brains available. Essentially all invasive human brain studies are preceded by animal model studies (usually starting with rodents before proceeding to "higher" animals if that's called for), but conversely not all animal model studies result in a human follow up. Meaning a hell of a lot more rodent brains get put under the microscope. So in general you would expect to find them in rodents first, if the probability of serendipitous discovery is purely a function of time spent conducting unrelated analyses.
  - kanzure 8y ago
    I wouldn't expect the number of human autopsies to be more than a few million over the entire history of the human species. Nobody looks at human brains. It's a huge problem.

jtbayly 8y ago

But we’re totally going to be able to simulate the human brain and upload consciousness into a computer, right?

bitL 8y ago
What if singularity already happened and we are its result?
- newsbinator 8y ago
  Then we could probably make it happen again, for us.
yoz-y 8y ago
eventually

phkahler 8y ago

"These types of cells [inhibitory neurons] are extremely important," he says. And when there's dysfunction in them, he says, that can "directly be linked to different types of neuropsychiatric disease, like schizophrenia." That's a really bold claim with nothing in the article backing it up. If I put my thinking cap on, perhaps there is an established link between failure of inhibitory neurons and neuropsychiatric disease (this would not surprise me but it's not called out in the article), but even if that has been established it's a big leap to assign so much importance to this particular variant of inhibitory neuron that has just been discovered (in dead people) and is barely understood.

bognition 8y ago
The claim isn't that bold, there is a well established link between inhibitory neuron disfunction and neuropsychiatric disorders. I think you're mis-reading the comment. The passage says that inhibitory neurons are important, not the 'Rose Hip' neurons.
- phkahler 8y ago
  You are correct. I interpreted that as saying these particular cells are important, not the general class of inhibitory neurons. The article also didn't (unless I missed it) spell out the connection between inhibitory activity and neuropsychiatric disorders. I had not heard of the relation between lack of inhibitory action and such disorders, but I know glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter and its deficiency can play a role in such disorders. Now I know of a more general framework to put that into. So this all make sense now, but it wasn't clear to me strictly from the article. Thanks.

vinceguidry 8y ago

I'm quite curious as to what provides for the kinds of mental 'structures' that make for so much of our inner lives. This is an old blog post, and seems to have lost the formatting, but this is the concept I'm pointing to: https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/07/31/pillar-management/ https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/07/31/pillar-management... The conclusions we come to, wind up constraining the thought space of our future thoughts. I believe this cognitive process demands explanation.

ilaksh 8y ago

I read the article, and it seems like it could be an important difference for some types of biology research, if they actually verify it isn't found in other species that they haven't checked yet. But my initial reaction to the headline was about AI research. My personal belief is that if you are looking at biology for help creating more powerful general purpose AI (AGI or "strong AI"), the idea that humans are special is actually mostly wrong and is counter-productive. For example there were many earlier efforts that emphasized reproducing the more rational aspects of human cognition (things animals seemed unable to do), but those turned out to be dead ends for AGI. Computers can do automated mathematical problem solving or proofs or play chess much better than humans, but it turns out that much of what people do doesn't have cut-and-dried rules that we can just enter in. Most, if not all of the capabilities that have been more difficult to achieve in AI are shared between humans and animals. If anyone has had a pet they might have noticed some abilities that may or may not have seemed particularly smart at that time. But when you start to look at it from the perspective of reproducing those abilities in robots, no one has come close. And those capabilities are shared with humans and can be mapped to higher-level abilities. For example, start with the advanced vision and motor systems that work together in the average house cat. Add in the ability to communicate and coerce humans into providing fresh food and water at will (ok, my cat was spoiled). The desire and ability of the cat to play in a slightly creative way -- my cat would look at me, arch her back, puff up her tail, tilt her head, as a clear communication that she wanted me to play chase with her. Then she would run and find a new place to hide. Or she would run up and smack me with both paws on the ankle at the same time, check that I had noticed and then run away -- another invitation to play. (Coincidentally, tag was also by far my nephew's favorite game when he was little.) I guess I don't really have the motivation today to make a really in-depth and convincing argument here. But at least consider making artificial cats before you make artificial humans. Even if you don't agree that it is a big step towards reproducing human abilities. Because cats _can_ be pretty great, but litter boxes are disgusting.