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Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7
- softgrow 17d agoWe are going to have to deprecate an idiom or two. "I'm in two minds about something" now gives the wrong meaning.
- readthenotes1 17d agoNot to mention the gut brain-- That's the organ I blame for the ice cream I just ate
- patates 17d agoThe best way to stop eating ice cream is to stop buying ice cream. If it's in the freezer, it'll be eaten.
- polotics 17d agoI think there is a better way: The colder something is, the less sweet it will taste. if you warm-up ice cream and taste how sickeningly sweet that soup is, you won't be having so much for a while...
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- dotancohen 17d agoThe best ice cream I ever had was at a small shop in Athens that had unsweetened ice cream.
- joshmn 17d agoBut how do you stop buying ice cream?
- Matumio 17d agoYou buy your groceries while that piece of your brain has no excuse to make loud demands ;-)
- exe34 17d agoEat your dinner before going to the shop.
- vanderZwan 17d agoAlso, doing high-effort endurance exercise for long enough suppresses grelin production (the hunger hormone). I've seen 30+ minutes of running or 60+ minutes of cycling as the most common rules of thumb. So in order to stack all these effects to maximum effect: plan exercise before meal, plan mean before doing groceries.
- samus 17d agoFill your freezer with frozen food other than ice cream.
- vanderZwan 17d agoI think that adipose tissue is the biggest criminal when it comes to unwanted hunger, since it produces hormones to make you hungry the moment you actually risk losing weight. Not sure how much the digestive neurons are involved with hunger actually, I thought its role was more about telling you which foods make you nauseous so you won't eat them, or subconsciously register which nutrients various foods have so you'ld crave the ones compensating for shortages more.
- samus 17d agoI heard adipose tissue also retains hormones and fat-soluble pollutants, and losing weight releases them and they have to be dealt with by the body in other ways. Specifically, the hormones can cause mood swings, which some individuals have learned to react to with binge eating.
- rolph 17d agono it isnt. it is derived from disparate progenitor cells. "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 these are not separate organs these are separate "stem cell" populations. under such a statement as submitted all of our organs that derive from varied populations of expressive constituency, would be amalgams of more than one organ.
- skavi 17d agovery naive question: does organ even have a strict enough definition for discussions like this to be worthwhile?
- rolph 16d agoa bit late chiming in, but, this is not a naive question. the definition of organ precedes developmental genetics, as a collection of tissues composing a structural unit, fullfilling a distinct function. its a sloppy definition in the contemporary, but what it does do is provide definition with respect to organizational level. the gist is that an organ is localized structure you can point towards, where as a diffused system, such as nervous system , requires a sweep of the hand, as it is distrubuted over the volume of the organism. the "common function" is the floor of the definition. what is clear from embryological study is that neural tissue is derived from communication between two embryonic cell plates, and the result is modified based on spatially based inductive signal consequences for gene regulation. these are not two separately derived organs later fusing to one mass, these are different regions of the same mass having different consequences of inductive signal.
- gfody 17d agowhen I was in school we were taught that the human brain was really two brains - the left and right hemispheres. it seemed to explain how you could learn a skateboard trick in your normal stance, then have to learn it again switch.
- TSP00N3 17d agoThe article discusses front and back rather than left and right sides of the brain
- TSP00N3 17d agoElon talked about this 10 years ago, saying we currently have 2 layers and how Neuralink could be the third: “When Elon refers to a “digital tertiary layer,” he’s considering our existing brain having two layers—our animal limbic system (which could be called our primary layer) and our advanced cortex (which could be called our secondary layer). The wizard hat interface, then, would be our tertiary layer—a new physical brain part to complement the other two.” Link: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
- n4r9 17d agoThe idea of the brain having a primitive layer and more refined layers is much more than ten years old [0]. The new finding here is that distinct layers have different progenitor cells. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain
- TSP00N3 17d agoInteresting, thanks for the insight! According to your Wikipedia link, the Truine brain theory is not widely recognized.. maybe this will change that to some extent.
- n4r9 17d agoI'm no expert, but my understanding is that modern neuroscience has moved away from the idea that specific areas of the brain control specific behaviours.
- k310 17d agobioRxiv preprint July 2025 [0] The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license. [0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2 PDF is free to download.
- msephton 17d agoRelated https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolved-from-two-primitive-nervous-systems-that-merged/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolv... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533
- bethekind 17d ago> They identified two different brain progenitor cells. One, which expresses a gene called Otx2, is destined to become the forebrain and midbrain. The other, which expresses a gene called Gbx2, is committed to forming the hindbrain. They showed that these two cell populations never overlap; they are mutually exclusive from the earliest stages of development. Very cool. Never thought the brain could have two completely different ancestors
- trhway 17d agoand from another post on the front page right now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735541 : "Nervous systems are typically defined as networks of neurons that communicate across synapses. But Burkhardt’s lab found something unique in ctenophores: Beneath the animal’s outer surface is a nerve net (pink mesh in this 3D reconstruction) whose neurons are connected by continuous cytoplasm — but with no synapses between them. “I don’t think any other animal has a nervous system like that,” Burkhardt said. Because ctenophores are one of the earliest branches of the animal family tree, the finding indicates that evolution may have crafted nervous systems twice: in ctenophores, and separately in jellyfish and all other animals."
- ozim 17d agoFunny thing when reading that is as a human I read „crafted nervous system twice” like it would be done over a week or two. We fail to imagine how much time takes to „craft a nervous system”. Super scary how small are we in big scheme of things.
- stymaar 17d agoI think the fact that the sentence says we share the nervous system with jellyfish gives a good indication of that.
- cmrx64 17d agohttps://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/senses/eye/ https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/senses/eye/ at one point I learned that it would only take a few hundred thousand years to evolve an eye, and time felt much deeper.
- geuis 17d agoThis isn't peer reviewed, just a press release. 10 other "papers" will be published in the next 2 weeks counterfinding anything in this post. Science moves forward yet again with a few backward steps.
- ykl 17d agoHere is the peer reviewed publication in Nature Neuroscience: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 The peer reviewed publication is linked to from the press release. The press release's headline does somewhat overhype up the actual finding though. The actual finding is that different parts of the brain arise from different neural ectoderm progenitors, which explains why it’s so hard to get a forebrain neuron to behave like a hindbrain neuron and vice versa in the lab. The paper then postulates that this difference in progenitors resembles being two different organs evolutionarily, but this is not really the most important part of the paper. BTW I suspect that this finding comes as completely unsurprising to biologists and the medical field generally. I'm not in either field, but even in high school biology we learned that the brain stem is behaviorally and structurally radically different from the rest of the brain, to the point where it seems almost obvious in hindsight that it's a different cell line and potentially has a different evolutionary history from the rest of the brain.
- pazimzadeh 17d agoI thought the PR article did a decent job or saying just that, except maybe for the title
- ykl 17d agoYeah, agreed. It's mostly just the title that is overhyped.
- pazimzadeh 17d agono idea what you're talking about. watson and crick's paper was not peer reviewed, neither were darwin's papers. not sure what you think happens in peer review but it's probably overrated.
- proc0 17d agoI can see how one of these is the gut feelings origin, and other bodily feelings.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- itvision 17d agoWhat a way to oversell the discovery. The reality is: * Different brain regions have different functions: ancient knowledge. * Different regions contain distinct cell types and molecular programs: also well established. * Anterior and posterior brain structures may trace back to fundamentally separate progenitor lineages that were independently specified very early in evolution and development: that's the interesting new result. The headline should have been: "Human forebrain and hindbrain arise from distinct embryonic progenitor lineages" - not that we have "two organs" in the brain.
- t-writescode 17d agoI mean, I learned a bunch of neat new stuff, so I’m excited!
- sandeepkd 17d agoThough I agree with the detailed differentiation, still for the headline purpose a generic one that resonates with people easily isn't a bad choice
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- jibal 17d agoLying is always a bad choice. The paper in Nature says "Hence, we postulate the brain is a composite organ emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors; these dual progenitors may be evolutionarily conserved across 550 million years from hemichordates to mammals."
- drabbiticus 17d agoIt's cool, but the headline is really pretty misleading. The new result seems to be that researchers have identified different progenitors for fore/midbrain vs. hindbrain and have found that they can be identified by some specific developmental gene markers. That's genuinely cool. However, organs are not typically defined by a single tissue characterized by a progenitor that can be labeled with a single gene marker. I suppose it's fine if on a functional and anatomical level you want to split the fore/midbrain and hindbrain into two different "organs", but whether you think of the brain as 1 organ or 2, it really doesn't change much in terms of how you would think about these regions. It isn't at all surprising that different regions of the brain have localized functions; some of the earliest evidence of this was how focal injuries (like strokes) have characteristic deficit patterns depending on brain region affected, and obviously there has been a lot of work since then further showing the organization, function and development of different brain regions.
- samus 17d agoThe impact is rather that is explains the failure of attempts to cultivate cell cultures of brainstem cells.
- johnnienaked 17d agoA bicameral mind cool
- linzhangrun 17d agoActually, the mind should only exist in the forebrain:0
- celadonuproot 17d agoAnd that's why we oftentimes talk about "brains" in the plural
- ksenzee 17d agoThe really exciting thing in this article is that this research led them to a new technique for growing brain stem cells in vitro, which has been very difficult until now. If that isn't being oversold, it's big news. That's going to make future research into diseases like ALS a lot easier.
- juleiie 17d ago[flagged]
- computerdork 16d agoeasy there:)
- holtkam2 16d agoHow do you have such stunning confidence that you're replying to someone who knows 'nothing about' the subject matter? Maybe he's a neuroscientist. I think YOU are the one showing stunning confidence in something you know nothing about (op's area of expertise. Unless you know them personally. Then ignore me).
- dekhn 16d agoCould you clarify what you are trying to achieve with this comment? I work in a related field and talk to stem cell/organoid growers from time to time. It is in fact hard to grow brain organoids from stem cells; this is still very much a thing that requires expert hands and minds to do effectively. Unfortunately I'm not able to validate the second point (that the results of the research made a new technique for growing brain cells) because the paper is very technical in ways I'm not an expert.
- burnte 16d agoNo one but you said "non important."
- computerdork 16d agoAgreed. This isn't being oversold. And actually, the fact that the brain is actually two "developmental" systems combined into one seems like big news to me. We might not know its other uses, but probably for cognitive science and even AI research this might be super useful. In AI, maybe two models should be developed and trained in conjunction that talk to each other, each with different functions and roles, because brains work better this way. And from what I read, evolution did this type of combined evolution somewhat often. The parts of the ear evolved from different "Gill slits" from when we were fish, meaning the ear isn't evolved from one group of cells in the embryo, but from multiple groups of cells that evolved into one organ system, the ear. Yeah, the middle ear evolved from a different "gill slit" from the outer and inner ear.
- jibal 17d agoThe title is factually incorrect and is not what the research actually found: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 Title: "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain". "Hence, we postulate the brain is a composite organ emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors; these dual progenitors may be evolutionarily conserved across 550 million years from hemichordates to mammals."
- nephihaha 17d agoI went to see Michael Gazzanigga talk about hemispheric separation some years ago. Fascinating. The two hemispheres can operate separately.
- jabagawee 17d ago> The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins. I'm not sure the actual article in Nature Neuroscience [1] actually says that. I remember "Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside" [2] from a few years ago, but I'm not sure where the dissonance comes from: my own misunderstanding, the press release using a popular but flawed model to communicate with laymen, or these two articles being in direct contradiction with each other? [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 [2]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721420917687 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721420917687
- dr_dshiv 17d ago[2] is an annoying pedantic article that illustrates little beyond a misconception of a misconception.
- zargon 17d ago"Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside" is a really stupid and pretentious article arguing against a straw man.
- computerdork 16d agoInteresting, but for me at least, this new research did not seem to promote the dispelled hypothesis about the reptile brain. Because the reptile brain hypothesis says a primitive reptile-brain evolved first (lower brain), then a separate part of the brain (upper brain) evolved later that was responsible for complex thought. Actually, the upper and lower brains evolved together and most animals have both, including reptiles. Didn't read it thoroughly, but your [2] reference seems to be saying this too.
- soVeryTired 17d agoWintermute and neuromancer!
- trocado 17d agoWhat is the difference between saying that the brain is two organs, as in the title, or a "composite organ" as in the actual paper? What makes an organ a single autonomous organ?
- samus 17d agoThe digestive tract could also be seen as a single organ since they are connected. I think the deciding criteria should be the one applied in this study, i.e., how an organ develops.
- meindnoch 17d agoFun fact: 80% of the brain's neurons are in the cerebellum, not the cortex. In other words: only <20% of pur neuron budget goes to higher cognition (thinking, language, seeing, hearing). 80% is spent on motor skills.
- dinfinity 17d ago> 80% is spent on motor skills. The cerebellum isn't just for motor skills. It's more of a place where very commonly used patterns get a bunch of dedicated wetware so the computation is superfast and precise. In an (undoubtedly very limited) analogy a bunch of FPGAs to complement the general processing. It does make a lot of sense to use this functionality for motor skills, though. See: - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4089997/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4089997/ - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38663092/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38663092/
- LoganDark 17d agoSo the 80% is spent on, more generally, habits and intuition. Makes sense.
- TeMPOraL 17d agoHeadline for IEEE: biologists show that human brain is basically a big FPGA devboard.
- bharatsuthar 17d agoWhen cache is bigger than the database.
- Dylan16807 17d agoWell it's not bigger...
- itsalwaysgood 17d agoIt's spent on 'fast, effortless' recall. Maybe, long-term memory, or memories associated with activities like balance, singing, and anything that requires precise steady control. A keeper of balance and rhythm, if you want to think of it that way, and anything that is too much of a burden to creativity: a mind is a bunch of ideas (thoughts) collected into a moment in the mind, all the ones needed for controlling things like balance and rhythm are best handled in an autonomously looped fashion (think Cybernetics: control loops that guide an agent). The article mentions the forebrain controls creativity, reasoning, higher-level thinking. And the hindbrain controls muscles of the throat, tongue, etc: so speech, singing. We all reach for some 'flow' state: perhaps it's this state where the 80% and 20% are more in harmony within the mind. Where what we create with our minds is appreciated, and the outer loop that critiques ourselves lays quiet. 'Flow' is achieved. Everything becomes an autonomous loop: which is the study of Cybernetics, and (coincidentally?) the birthplace of AI. If we follow the pattern of simulating biology, I would expect some ratio of compute could be determined 'optimal' for the new Dream-RSI technique recently: https://www.dream-rsi.com/ https://www.dream-rsi.com/ to eventually move towards '80%' of compute for autonomously controlled systems, and 20% towards 'something else'. The ratio won't be there in the beginning because an AI system has different autonomous needs. Through testing and iteration, we'll arrive at some ratio as technology matures: my guess is it will match the one we find in our own heads: 80% for autonomous functions, 20% for creativity. Keep in mind, dreaming and recursive self-improvement as it is now, is a big unknown: nobody knows what ratio is best, but honestly it's less important because we're all looking at 'Quality' of results right now. But as the technology matures and moves into robotics and more, and more complexity is required to 'do work': I expect 80% to be accurate.
- Perenti 17d agoAll the comments I see are about is it two organs, or a composite organ. Surely the interesting thing is the ability to grow hindbrain cells in vitreo. That's what's potentially going to lead to the cure of lots of things, not whether 1=2.
- burnte 16d agoBoth are fascinating. I've had a pet theory for 30 years that there is not a single "mind" but that we're made up of more isolated aspects that do different things and working in concert we come up with our idea of "a mind".
- heddhunter 16d agoHave you ever done any mindfulness meditation? I hit on a similar idea while meditating. My analogy is the brain is like the full spectrum of radio frequencies, but there's a "main station" that is "I". From time to time you lose that signal and tune into something else. And just because you're not listening to it, it doesn't mean the other stations aren't still broadcasting. I have no idea if there's a biological origin for any of this, but it definitely fits with my experience of meditation and awareness training.
- pixl97 16d agoWhen you turn your thoughts inward you're depending more heavily on the Default Mode Network. I'm not well versed in it, but I believe conditions like anxiety and ADHD are partially caused by "too much" activity from this feature of the brain. With meditation you learn to adjust how much activity is occurring here by (not?) focusing on it.
- fooker 17d agoSo, what we colloquially call 'reptile brain' turns out to be somewhat accurate.
- HarHarVeryFunny 17d agoThere is some truth (but not accuracy) to it, but not for this reason. This article is about brainstem (aka hindbrain) vs the rest (midbrain + forebrain). Evolutionally older animal lineages like fish, reptiles, birds all have midbrain + forebrain as well as the brainstem, so reptilian brain != brainstem. Where there is some truth to our older "reptilian" brain is that the part of the forebrain called the pallium, that exists even in fish (& reptiles), has much expanded/evolved in mammals giving us our cortex and hippocampus, so you could kinda say that we have a reptilian brain + cortex. Note though that mammals didn't evolve from reptiles - they evolved in parallel from a common ancestor, so maybe better to say we have a fish brain + cortex (& hippocampus). While the cortex is what gives mammals their intelligence, in birds the pallium evolved in a different way to give them theirs.
- computerdork 16d agoam no expert in brain development, still have read about evolution. I like aspects of the way you mentioned this, but seems that putting cortex separately from fish brain isn't quite right. As you mentioned, the cortex is simply a part of the fish brain that evolved much (much, much) larger than a fish's. Maybe: Fish Brain = brain stem + small cortex (+ other parts of brain) | (evolved into) | V Human Brain = brain stem + gigantic cortex (+ other parts of brain) Sorry, know this is splitting hairs, but just thought it a useful distinction to make.
- HarHarVeryFunny 16d agoThat's not quite right - a fish does not have a cortex. The pallium of a fish and mammal are structured differently. A fish's (& bird's) pallium has a clustered (aka "nuclear") organization, while a mammal's has a mostly layered organization which is what is referred to as the cortex. There is also more to a brain than just brainstem + pallium. In a vertebrate it's brainstem (aka hindbrain) + midbrain + forebrain, with the pallium being part of the forebrain.
- jb1991 17d agoHm, I’m of two minds on this one.
- jacobedawson 17d ago[flagged]
- austin-cheney 17d agoI don’t think the medical community has believed as the article claims for nearly a century. Most animal brains have three very different organs in the brain: the cerebrum, cerebellum, and the limbic system (which itself is further divided into numerous differentiated types of tissues)
- dotancohen 17d agoTFA refers to the evolutionarily history of the brain, not the specialised functionality of different parts of the brain.
- pixl97 16d agoThis isn't about organs but the gene expression that is used to create the organs.
- soizi 17d agothat's funny when I was in junior school, 15 years ago, I said in the classroom during science class, that we have 2 brains. everyone including my teacher were laughed at me.
- fahrvrgnugen 17d ago[flagged]
- ibaikov 17d agoThere's a very interesting split-brain experiment [1] and Joe Scott's video about it [2] TL;DW: Doctors treated corpus callosotomy by severing the bundle of nerve fibers that connect hemispheres of the brain. The surgery effectively stopped seizures from spreading. Left hemisphere handles language, speech, and logical interpretation, right hemisphere handles visual, spatial, and literal tasks. Because human eyes send visual information to opposite sides of the brain, researchers could show images only to the non-speaking right brain. The right brain could see and physically react to the image (like picking up a matching object with the left hand), but the patient couldn't verbally explain what they were seeing because the left brain was literally in the dark. Instead of saying "I don't know," the speaking left brain would instantly and confidently invent a logical—but completely fake—justification for the action. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TYuTid9a6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TYuTid9a6k
- james_ilands 17d ago[dead]
- designerarvid 17d agoIsn’t it funny how Freud, and probably earlier thinkers, have suggested exactly that the mind is layered like this.
- batmang 17d agoHow occurate its any experts ?
- tarun_anand 17d agoI worked with a doctor once to build a 3D Model of the brain apertures. Disclaimer: the work presents these as spiritual/meditational reference points, not established neuroanatomical structures. Textual reconstruction of the “Brain Apertures” diagram used in the Radhasoami/Surat Shabd Yoga tradition. The named “apertures” are spiritual/meditational reference points in this tradition; labels such as temporal lobe, occipital lobe, cerebellum and brain stem are anatomical landmarks shown in the source diagram in the doc below. Some details here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N9KxIWNF_z9twZurRgkTLljfTRJmoQZaeU3p2nIuOUk/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N9KxIWNF_z9twZurRgkTLljf...
- enjrolas 17d agoI feel like, even though they got this knowledge, any researcher at any time could have grown hindbrain cells from pluripotent stem cells -- the resulting practice didn't _require_ the understanding. I also don't get why they needed a pluripotent stem cell and not, say, another hindbrain neuron. I get the claim that you can't get forebrain neurons to act like hindbrain neurons, but is it possible that every previous researcher who was trying to grow hindbrain neurons in vitro was starting with forebrain neurons?
- Meleagris 17d agoI wasn't expecting to get hit by AI generated slop on Standford's website. At least mark the article as being produced by AI. > “What they found was striking: … These differences essentially locked each progenitor cell into its respective fate, like travelers on parallel tracks that never cross.” The dramatic colon, the obligatory closing metaphor, makes me ill.
- ls-a 17d ago[dead]
- excalibur 17d agoI expected an article full of basic medical jargon: cerebrum, cerebellum, cortex, synapse, etc. Instead it's talking about "forebrain" and "hindbrain". This sounds remarkably unscientific.
- 1970-01-01 17d agoWhich is the one zombies hunger for and which is the one driving their unstoppable hunger? Maybe they just really miss having their brain whole again, and eating and walking is the only thing they know?
- doctoboggan 17d agoDoes each separate “organ” here have any relationship to the two separate functions identified in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”?
- m0llusk 17d agoIn short, no. The two types of thinking are both forebrain activity. One comes to a quick guess with pattern matching, the other goes slower with reasoning. It could be that some fast thinking is influenced by the hindbrain in some way, but the thoughts themselves are constructs in the conscious mind that inhabits the frontal lobes.
- the__alchemist 17d agoI learned of the Triune Brain through Carl Sagan's book The Dragons of Eden. It was an engaging, story-telling approach to a somewhat, in hindsight controversial concept. It sounds (oversimplified) like the paper the article describes here is an embryological validation of this model.
- steve_taylor 16d agoThe Triune Brain model is poo-pooed by modern science, but this study partially vindicates it.
- Alien1Being 17d agoTabloid like headline... Pity about the dumbed down for dummies, fake marketing from Stanford.
- Alien1Being 17d agoThe actual research says something far less clickworthy. Are Stanford's PR dribbles now created by LLMs ? "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain Abstract When and how different brain regions diversify from one another remains unresolved. Does a common neural ectoderm progenitor generate the entire brain? Or do multiple neural ectoderm progenitors exist, each restricted to form specific brain regions? Here our lineage tracing studies of mouse embryos support the latter model. Two parallel brain progenitors emerge simultaneously during gastrulation: anterior neural ectoderm (forebrain/midbrain progenitor) and posterior neural ectoderm (hindbrain progenitor). Differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into anterior or posterior neural ectoderm-like cells revealed these were lineage committed to forebrain/midbrain versus hindbrain fates, respectively. They harbored diverging chromatin landscapes foreshadowing future forebrain/midbrain versus hindbrain identities. We further differentiated human pluripotent stem cells into hindbrain rhombomere 5/6-specific motor neurons, which were hitherto difficult to generate in vitro. Hence, we postulate the brain is a composite organ emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors; these dual progenitors may be evolutionarily conserved across 550 million years from hemichordates to mammals."
- itsalwaysgood 17d agoI think it's very interesting news. We've known about the brain's separate parts, and separate functions for a while. It was always assumed our evolution of the brain was neatly, and tidily tucked away as somethat that branches off a singular thing. A single step from the pluripotent, 'infinitely renewable' stem cell into another single progenitor. This suggested a sequence of events, causes and effects, that somehow our minds today can be evolved from a singular 'step' within growth. Only our brains seems have this requirement. So this requirement, in and of itself, is interesting and newsworthy. For whatever purposes, it's 2 separate systems that many living organisms evolve in the same way. It's 2 steps, for some physical reason.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- inshard 17d agoNot just humans… all mammals.
- ChrisArchitect 17d ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533
- reso_codes 16d ago[flagged]
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- contubernio 16d agoStanford researcher discovers his head and his ass aren't the same thing.
- mrburton 16d agoI honestly can't wait for AI to analyze the brain so we can truly understand the composition of it. I always come back to this man and it ... no pun intended.. really blows my mind. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.3679117/scientists-research-man-missing-90-of-his-brain-who-leads-a-normal-life-1.3679125 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...
- randomImmigrant 16d agoTerrible headline, cool research. The brain is a composit of cells from two lineages that separate very early in development and reflect a deeper spatial and functional separation deep in the history of metazoan (read: animal) evolution. Tying all this to humans specifically is just confusing. This is something that’s seen in a substantial portion of animals, and as such has nothing to do with “ poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins”. These features of humans evolved hundreds of millions of years after this two lineage composite organization of animal brains evolved. I wish the article hadn’t gone out of its way in confusing these issues to push the “relevance” of the research. It’s a pretty remarkable finding anyway.
- LukeB42 16d agoThat headline's as psyoppy as "schizophrenia".
- Narciss 16d agoMy GF says I have neither.
- herodoturtle 16d agoMade me think of “Brainscan”, awesome sci-fi from the 90s.
- HarHarVeryFunny 16d agoI've just being doing some googling to try to understand this research better. It seems that it's been known for a while that more primitive animals have/had functionally distinct front (sensory) and rear (motor + autonomic) neural systems, with different genes (Otx, Gbx) associated with each. In 2003 it was shown that an extant species, acorn worms, have this front/sensory, rear/motor neural division, assumed to date back to the pre-chordates. In vertebrates we also see this association of Otx gene expression in the fore/midbrain and Gbx in the hindbrain, but it had been assumed that these "two halves" of the brain had fused long ago... What this new research shows is that this fusion only happens during development of the embryo, which seems to be a fairly common phenomena "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" whereby embryonic development follows the same steps as evolution (e.g. human embryo also has a tail, chicken embryo has teeth). Of course the front/sensory and rear/motor neural systems aren't totally isolated, since the sensory signals serve to steer the motor programs running in the back, and our brain still follows this primitive division of functionality.
- rolph 16d agothe forebrain, and hindbrain, dont merge during development, and they are not derived of radically different cells, and they originate from the same process. the difference between them is expressive regulation. wikipedia being what it is, on par with secondary literature gives an overview of brain and nervous system origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_nervous_system_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_nervous_sys... the primary discipline is embryology, and if you view the progression from cellular to somatic, it is quite clear that structure of nervous system, and brain are early events during organogenesis, and are derived from contact and signalling between cellular plates. there is a gradient derived signal, that induces disparate potency of genetic expression. there is however, not , two individual centers of cellular genesis, all neural cells are derived from same cell cell interaction, and induced to take a constrained set of functionalities based on signal amplitudes. https://embryology.oit.duke.edu/neuro/neuro.html https://embryology.oit.duke.edu/neuro/neuro.html the original research in question did not discover a two brain merger, thats a tragic misinterpretation that is doing disservice, and is not even the claim of the research. the discovery is the difference in genetic expression that required a different cultural regime for hindbrain neurons invitro. previously the paradigm was that forebrain, and hindbrain required almost similar culture, and this discovery allows realization of that fact, leading to a cultural regime promoting invitro hindbrain neuroculture.
- pixl97 16d ago>the original research in question did not discover a two brain merger, thats a tragic misinterpretation that is doing disservice, and is not even the claim of the research. And after they discovered this I'm assuming another group of researchers did a genetic overview of when this feature would have split off from the evolutionary tree and we see it was over 500m years ago in dual networked organisms.
- danielovichdk 16d agoAI is not a brain, now pay me.
- shepardrtc 16d agoThread about this from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533
- bilater 16d agoI wonder if there is a principle here we can apply to neural nets like dividing up the layers for different tasks (no not MoE but something more fundamental).
- lowbloodsugar 16d agoDidn’t we fix the title yesterday?
- stack_framer 16d ago“A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” — James 1:8 (KJV)
- pixl97 16d agoHence why all minds are unstable because we are 9f way more than two minds.
- tsoukase 16d agoHemispheric neurons seem totally different than those of brain stem, the latter being more like an extention of spinal cord. Higher neurons are not only specialized but they form sophisticated centres and complicated networks that process the highest sensory and motor signals and form what human is. The brain stem only contains nuclei and autonomic centres that are of low complexity. We knew they are different, kudos to the team that explored, proved, published and even applied this knowledge.
- chrisjj 16d ago> Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain True title: Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds The HN title misleads people as to the value of the article.
- thereforegrin 16d agoTo be honest it's both interesting and embarrassing to discover that no brain researcher had ever investigated brain cells' development from the very beginning to know the lineages of various cells. This just goes to show how huge holes we have in even the most basic knowledge about biology. We can cut'n'splice DNA in various ways, but up until now we didn't even know where do all of our neurons come from. There are still more unknowns in those basic areas of biology e.g. how bio-currents shape development of organs in both an embryo and a fully developed organism. It's rather obvious that there are key differences there but we don't have any solid knowledge about this mechanics itself, let alone on how it differs as the organism matures.