Posted by emigre 3 hours ago
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.
"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."
"Human brain was two separate organs"
Then, both attention grabbig and true?
(if I'm reading parent poster correctly)
While it might not be perfectly accurate it's hardly misleading.
When submitting, one can try to replace the title with something honest. HN does not favor that, mostly due to submitters having their own biases.
The best tactic is finding a higher quality article on the subject, to submit instead. That's uncertain, takes time, and may run into paywall issues.
"Elon Musk's Brain is Two Separate Organs"
I want to trust science and dislike anti vaxxers but it’s difficult to argue against them when researchers act like the caricature they are mocked as.
Self aggrandizing articles with misleading headlines is giving me 2 triggers for not trusting the content.
Very cool. Never thought the brain could have two completely different ancestors
"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."
We fail to imagine how much time takes to „craft a nervous system”.
Super scary how small are we in big scheme of things.
at one point I learned that it would only take a few hundred thousand years to evolve an eye, and time felt much deeper.
In other words: only <20% of pur neuron budget goes to higher cognition (thinking, language, seeing, hearing). 80% is spent on motor skills.
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
PDF is free to download.
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 [2]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721420917687
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.