this is not the claim made by the researchers generating this paper.
this is thier claim :
“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a petri dish and study their functions.”
in translation, the two regions of the brain develop from different expressive states of the progenitor populations. the problem was difficulty culturing cerebellar neurons, due to a unrecognized disparity in genetic expressivity. the neurons were being manipulated as if they were running the same config.sys, and that was not the case. this work elucidates that fact and recognizes it as essential, to invitro culture of "hindbrain" neurons.
The findings were published in Nature Neuroscience Sept. 18. Loh is the senior author. Graduate students Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai are co-first authors of the research.
Does this help explain why the circuits that control emotional crying, which rely on connections that span the anterior, posterior and midbrain, develop?
For those interested in brain evolution and practical neuroscience/human behavior:
Carl Sagan's books "Broca's Brain" and "The Dragons of Eden" from the 70's-80's are good initial reads on brain composition and evolution. The Sapolsky lectures and books are also great resources.
The comments in the other post on this topic had an article which slammed Sagan's book for being outdated and espousing debunked triune Brian theory. The article was called "your brain is not an onion with a lizard inside".
There was a book in the 1970s called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes, where he argued that ancient civilizations -- and he used examples from Homer -- lacked the current modern sense of self-consciousness. If you look at their behavior, they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions, whereas if you read modern literature you see people being driven by an inner voice which they associate with themselves.
This shift from the "bicameral mentality" of the external voice to the modern mentality of the inner voice was hypothesized by Jaynes to be rooted in some biological changes in the brain. At the time there was split brain research that showed these two parts of the brain function independently almost as two different minds in the same skull. See this 2007 survey: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6323702_The_bicamer...
Not necessarily, could be a change in environment. E.g. teaching people to read by imagining a voice in their head teaches them the voice is their own.
Also, that study is extremely dubious/barring on fan-fiction.
Homer (if he was even a person) recited oral epic poetry (that we've lost most of) and we've written down an extremely lossy version of it.
Why should we take any of the mythical character's interactions with mythical gods as any insight for the brains of real humans???
It'd be like year 4000 historians citing World of Warcraft claiming the Lich King is a very obvious example that humans lack an internal monologue because he was not able to distinguish his own motives/actions between Ner'zhul/Arthas (both spiritual entities inhabiting the "Lich King" body).
I mean I definitely disagree with the book's argument, and you're right that it's making a different argument than the article, but I think straight up declaring it irrelevant is coming in way too hot. It's also an argument for a merging of separate mental structures that's sourcing the change in an event from recent natural history.
Again, I don't agree with the book's argument, but declaring an argument proposing a similar convergence on the basis of entirely different reasons to be not even mentionable in response to the article is just getting way too overzealous with comment section policing.
"too hot" and "way too overzealous" is ad hominem, and talking about comment section policing is remarkably hypocritical -- you're actually telling someone not to make certain sorts of comments, which pointing out that something is not relevant to the article doesn't do. Your "not even mentionable" is a complete fabrication -- the comment from dinobones said nothing of the sort. Your whole shtick about "getting way too overzealous with comment section policing" is a complete fabrication -- a projection of what you are doing onto a simple factual statement. And your "Uh, yes" comment below is more obnoxious trolling and attacking strawmen.
My immediate reaction to the comment about Jaynes's book and the split brain was that it's not relevant to the article, and it conflates three very different things. The comment omits the crucial fact that the split brain research was on people whose corpus collosum had been cut -- no surprise that "these two parts of the brain function independently" since they were no longer attached to each other (which is the complete opposite of what TFA is about). Jaynes's hypothesis was not related in any way to that research, and neither are related in any way to TFA. As someone else noted: "Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago." -- the clear implication being that Jaynes and split brains aren't relevant. But if anyone actually dares say so, here comes the too hot overzealous comment section policeman to project his own attributes onto them.
And this is completely aside from whether Jaynes's argument is valid ... you saying multiple times that you disagree with it is also utterly irrelevant and reflects one of several fundamental errors in logic in your comments. But criticisms of your comments is not "comment section policing" -- how absurd ... and dinobones didn't even do that in simply saying that a comment wasn't relevant to the article ... only in your head was "and therefore you are not allowed to post it here". Presumably the comment was made in good faith. I can even grant the same about yours, with a bit of straining and extraordinary charity.
The premise (and this is how the GP comment put it) was that humans around Homer's time had fundamentally different brain structures, and that differences in poetry and thinking processes could be explained by looking at how brains changed over the last few thousand years.
That's not "overzealous comment section policing". It's rejecting a premise that is completely infeasible with everything we know about human evolution (or relative lack thereof) during that timespan.
What could plausibly cause that change in just a few thousand years?
I cannot see how this could be true without it following that not everyone will have this change as it is far too recent to have spread to everyone every where. Where are these people who lack it?
My read was that they were also disagreeing with it (and I personally disagree with it too for exactly the reasons you mention).
But the problem in this case isn't just that it's right or wrong, it's that it at least belongs to a related family of arguments that are fair game to explore in response to the article. Some of the best conversations take the form of knowing something is wrong but powering through the struggle of putting the why into words, and all the associated conversational branching that can happen along the way.
Uh, yes. It's overzealous because personally disagreeing with something doesn't mean that it's outside the scope of the subject matter that the article is speaking to. If anything, you're reaffirming the commonalities between the theory and what's proposed in the article because what they have in common is a proposed difference in brain structures followed by a convergence.
The fact that you disagree with the truth of the theory has literally nothing to do with whether it's on point in response to an article that's about the same subject matter. I would have hoped that me saying multiple times that I disagreed with it would have made clear already that there's more going on here than just a matter of whether you do or don't disagree with it. Declaring that it's "not overzealous" mirrors my language back at me but without attaching an actual argument to it.
It’s an interesting book for sure, but I had (minor, but still) issues even with the introductory premises. Just a few notes I made from the very first chapter:
- Jaynes used the term “reminiscence” in a way very different from Ballard and claimed no animal is capable of reminiscence. That was a very odd claim overall.
- Then he claimed that if we ever create a language that can express everything, metaphors won’t be possible. Which is, I think, almost obviously false, because many metaphors are constructed artistically, despite having exact terms.
- And he talks about spatialization as a primitive aspect of consciousness, but he seems to talk about relations/connectedness at best.
And so on - I misplaced my notes somewhere and only recovered a few random bits. Still, interesting reading, fun (albeit really questionable) core idea, but those papercuts were kinda off-putting for me.
His theory was that the two brain halves communicated through inner voices. Wernickes Area, on the left side, communicated with the similar area on the right side. WA is where we comprehend speech, so Jaynes theorized that was why bicameral people experienced the communication as inner voices.
The research in the new research paper is about a split between front and back of the brain. So something entirely different. That split is an old idea. Jaynes would most likely have known about it. But it wasnt part of his theory.
> they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions
...in a specific region, in a specific time period, immediately before the economic and then societal crash of the eastern Mediterranean that changed culture in the region forever.
The hypothesis breaks down pretty hard when you realize he just kind of handwaves away people in the rest of the world not having any kind of abrupt cut-over in the styles of recorded literature that forms the backbone of his arguments.
I think the trouble is once your category is loosey-goosey enough it could be open-ended to the point that anything can fit it.
The fact that overall of recorded history you can find instances of any sort of interaction with something that's felt to be a voice that's independent from one's own subjectivity is open-ended to the point that it can fit the literary and cultural history of basically any civilization on Earth.
What would be more impressive is some additional specificity, any sort of evolutionary mechanism, and any sort of supporting biological data. Otherwise the thing that is being described here isn't a theory, it's barely even vibes. This is to vibes what vibes are to coherently formed thoughts.
Yes, Jaynes used a comprehensive approach, albeit one rooted in literature. I only threw in "Homer" as an example to be clear that "ancient civilizations" referred to bronze age and before, and that this was not the Joe Rogan kind of ancient civilizations.
It's one of the craziest, most interesting books i've read on the mind. He makes a much stronger argument than can be summarized in a comment. He takes you on a wild journey you are surprisingly ill-equipped for.
And as this complexity develops, there is the first unsureness, the first need for personal gods to intercede with the higher gods, who seem to be receding into the heavens where in one brief millennium they will have disappeared.
This aligns with Christ’s redemptive work. Someone above even mentioned that a change had to happen to all humans about 3000 years ago, that’s about when Christ died (2000 years). It was told his spirit would enter the world when he died.
The thing you are referencing is actually describing the alleged Holy Spirit entering the world:
(With a little help from AI, don’t kill me)
In Christian pneumatology (the study of the Holy Spirit), there is a similar paradigm shift between the ancient world and the New Testament. In the Old Covenant, God's presence was primarily external (pillars of fire, the Ark of the Covenant, stone tablets). With Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, God's presence moves inside human believers ("a new heart... and a new spirit within you," Ezekiel 36:26; 1 Corinthians 6:19).
Development of Conscience: The transition from external command-driven behavior to an internal moral compass echoes the New Testament promise that God's law would be written directly onto human hearts and minds (Jeremiah 31:33).
—-
The change Julian Jaynes observes was actually divinely promised, interesting that it can be measured.
Further, the original study that sees the merging of the two parts of the brain would also fit the Holy Spirit providing reconciliation of how your brain is even wired after it was imparted onto the world. This was all promised , if you believe Christ. It’s even more reassuring that that this biological reconciliation happened around when Christ died , plus or minus a thousand years.
Interesting. Might explain why the cerebellum and cortex work so differently? I wonder what the two ancient nervous systems looked like at the point where they merged.
Its a joke. You know they say ADHD types made great hunters thousands of years ago, because they can hyperfocus on that gazelle while constantly keeping their head on a swivel.
It's a crude analogy, but I would say the hindbrain is more like the system management co-processor or controller that tends to low-level hardware features.
The forebrain is the main processor. It does all the stuff you think of from OS to application, and has some ability to monitor and even interfere in the system management co-processor.
Whether either of these things have interesting internal structure and functional decomposition is left unaddressed. This observation about the progenitor cells is a bit like seeing the BOM that says they come from different suppliers.
I think it's also a bit of guesswork to try to reason out the evolutionary history. I.e. was either unit "in the market" longer and useful on its own, versus essentially complementary parts that just happen to have a divided supply chain! Intuition about evolutionary processes and life makes it really easy to assume the hindbrain is an older, legacy system that existed independently or with other long-lost companion units.
Clearly.. this is not some new revelation, it has been the default assumption for a very long time, probably over a hundred years.
Damage to the hind brain results in behavioural changes that are blatantly different compared to when the "newer" parts of the brain is damaged. The cerebellum literally even has a different color.
Just for context: parent comment was posted when the submission title was "Human brain is two separate organs, research finds". We've since changed it.
(Perhaps the updated title is less objectionable?)
i have no idea whether the initial commentor is actually a neurosurgeon. applying good faith, he is a neurosurgeon, he saves lives and is deserving of respect. you're completely correct that an appeal to authority is fallacious in an argumentative context. you're also behaving like a dick to somebody who saves lives. don't care who is right or wrong here, made my comment to suggest that you're behaving disrespectfully. if I was unintentionally doing the same, I would appreciate being informed that the same point could have been made in a more respectful manner. although, if you're also at neurosurgeon calibre, then I am incorrect and this comment is redundant.
really? conditional on them actually being neurosurgeon, I'd place a lot more stock on it than on a random headline based on their authority alone. So I, for one, care.
Argument from authority is a bad thing specifically when it's used to make incorrect claims on the basis of authority. But authority as a concept still has plenty of merit.
Always be suspicious of people who don't atleast give us even a single valid sentence to construct the chain of thought that would lead to their negation or assertion.
An authority claim by virtue of itself is not worth investigating. Science doesn't work that way. Math doesn't work that way.
While many comments are about brain lateralization, which this research does not address, an interesting aspect is how much it would lend credence to the "Triune Model" of the brain [0], which is generally described as discredited.
The authors limit their claims to "the longstanding question in developmental biology of how and when different regions of the central nervous system diversify from one another." So folks wanting to see a "lizard brain" in there will have to keep searching.
Edit/Append: Something I will keep an eye out for is how this knowledge changes the understanding of cephalopod brain dev/func. If hemichordates were evolutionarily later than protostomes like an octopus, what will that mean for the types of neural cells available for them? If octopus neurology is more like "forebrain and midbrain—which are both aNE-derived lineages," then does that mean that the "posterior neural ectoderm (pNE)" is evolutionarily later?
"You Are Two" [0] is a video that talks about what happens when the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is severed.
If you've never seen it I HIGHLY recommend it if only to show how weird our brains actually are.
A good chaser to the above is Peter Watts talk on hive minds [1]. He was a neurology research and the author of the famous sci-fi novel Blindgsight [2]
Thank you for the link to Watts’ talk. It is a great watch and is certainly a great jumping off point for anyone writing fiction in the field.
It also could be one of the most terrifying talks I’ve ever heard, but since it is eight years old, I am going to just pretend all of the research he mentions fell through and I have nothing worry about.
this is not the claim made by the researchers generating this paper.
this is thier claim :
“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a petri dish and study their functions.”
in translation, the two regions of the brain develop from different expressive states of the progenitor populations. the problem was difficulty culturing cerebellar neurons, due to a unrecognized disparity in genetic expressivity. the neurons were being manipulated as if they were running the same config.sys, and that was not the case. this work elucidates that fact and recognizes it as essential, to invitro culture of "hindbrain" neurons.
The findings were published in Nature Neuroscience Sept. 18. Loh is the senior author. Graduate students Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai are co-first authors of the research.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7
Does this help explain why the circuits that control emotional crying, which rely on connections that span the anterior, posterior and midbrain, develop?
Seems to be based on the Stanford article: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/09/two-separate-...
Which is a much better article
For those interested in brain evolution and practical neuroscience/human behavior:
Carl Sagan's books "Broca's Brain" and "The Dragons of Eden" from the 70's-80's are good initial reads on brain composition and evolution. The Sapolsky lectures and books are also great resources.
I'd imagine the science from the 80s is very dated now, no matter how good the book is.
The comments in the other post on this topic had an article which slammed Sagan's book for being outdated and espousing debunked triune Brian theory. The article was called "your brain is not an onion with a lizard inside".
There was a book in the 1970s called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes, where he argued that ancient civilizations -- and he used examples from Homer -- lacked the current modern sense of self-consciousness. If you look at their behavior, they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions, whereas if you read modern literature you see people being driven by an inner voice which they associate with themselves.
This shift from the "bicameral mentality" of the external voice to the modern mentality of the inner voice was hypothesized by Jaynes to be rooted in some biological changes in the brain. At the time there was split brain research that showed these two parts of the brain function independently almost as two different minds in the same skull. See this 2007 survey: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6323702_The_bicamer...
That would imply a biological change in all humans in the last ~3000 years after humans had already dispersed across the entire globe?
That means whatever the change was would have to had occur simultaneously in separate populations all over the world within almost no time at all.
Not necessarily, could be a change in environment. E.g. teaching people to read by imagining a voice in their head teaches them the voice is their own.
It's probably BS though.
That also implies isolated populations would not have the same sense of consciousness until they gain literacy or whatever else has that effect?
If consciousness results from language and culture then some cultures will lack it.
That’s not a biological change.
Learning anything biologically changes your brain.
Writing and reading existed before the Ancient Greeks, including China and Mesoamerica.
So basically "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? Children of changed society are also changed?
Obviously? That's why we all grow up addicted to tiktok now, when we didn't 30 years ago.
Not relevant to the article.
Also, that study is extremely dubious/barring on fan-fiction.
Homer (if he was even a person) recited oral epic poetry (that we've lost most of) and we've written down an extremely lossy version of it.
Why should we take any of the mythical character's interactions with mythical gods as any insight for the brains of real humans???
It'd be like year 4000 historians citing World of Warcraft claiming the Lich King is a very obvious example that humans lack an internal monologue because he was not able to distinguish his own motives/actions between Ner'zhul/Arthas (both spiritual entities inhabiting the "Lich King" body).
I mean I definitely disagree with the book's argument, and you're right that it's making a different argument than the article, but I think straight up declaring it irrelevant is coming in way too hot. It's also an argument for a merging of separate mental structures that's sourcing the change in an event from recent natural history.
Again, I don't agree with the book's argument, but declaring an argument proposing a similar convergence on the basis of entirely different reasons to be not even mentionable in response to the article is just getting way too overzealous with comment section policing.
"too hot" and "way too overzealous" is ad hominem, and talking about comment section policing is remarkably hypocritical -- you're actually telling someone not to make certain sorts of comments, which pointing out that something is not relevant to the article doesn't do. Your "not even mentionable" is a complete fabrication -- the comment from dinobones said nothing of the sort. Your whole shtick about "getting way too overzealous with comment section policing" is a complete fabrication -- a projection of what you are doing onto a simple factual statement. And your "Uh, yes" comment below is more obnoxious trolling and attacking strawmen.
My immediate reaction to the comment about Jaynes's book and the split brain was that it's not relevant to the article, and it conflates three very different things. The comment omits the crucial fact that the split brain research was on people whose corpus collosum had been cut -- no surprise that "these two parts of the brain function independently" since they were no longer attached to each other (which is the complete opposite of what TFA is about). Jaynes's hypothesis was not related in any way to that research, and neither are related in any way to TFA. As someone else noted: "Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago." -- the clear implication being that Jaynes and split brains aren't relevant. But if anyone actually dares say so, here comes the too hot overzealous comment section policeman to project his own attributes onto them.
And this is completely aside from whether Jaynes's argument is valid ... you saying multiple times that you disagree with it is also utterly irrelevant and reflects one of several fundamental errors in logic in your comments. But criticisms of your comments is not "comment section policing" -- how absurd ... and dinobones didn't even do that in simply saying that a comment wasn't relevant to the article ... only in your head was "and therefore you are not allowed to post it here". Presumably the comment was made in good faith. I can even grant the same about yours, with a bit of straining and extraordinary charity.
I won't respond further.
Uh, no.
The premise (and this is how the GP comment put it) was that humans around Homer's time had fundamentally different brain structures, and that differences in poetry and thinking processes could be explained by looking at how brains changed over the last few thousand years.
That's not "overzealous comment section policing". It's rejecting a premise that is completely infeasible with everything we know about human evolution (or relative lack thereof) during that timespan.
What could plausibly cause that change in just a few thousand years?
I cannot see how this could be true without it following that not everyone will have this change as it is far too recent to have spread to everyone every where. Where are these people who lack it?
My read was that they were also disagreeing with it (and I personally disagree with it too for exactly the reasons you mention).
But the problem in this case isn't just that it's right or wrong, it's that it at least belongs to a related family of arguments that are fair game to explore in response to the article. Some of the best conversations take the form of knowing something is wrong but powering through the struggle of putting the why into words, and all the associated conversational branching that can happen along the way.
Uh, yes. It's overzealous because personally disagreeing with something doesn't mean that it's outside the scope of the subject matter that the article is speaking to. If anything, you're reaffirming the commonalities between the theory and what's proposed in the article because what they have in common is a proposed difference in brain structures followed by a convergence.
The fact that you disagree with the truth of the theory has literally nothing to do with whether it's on point in response to an article that's about the same subject matter. I would have hoped that me saying multiple times that I disagreed with it would have made clear already that there's more going on here than just a matter of whether you do or don't disagree with it. Declaring that it's "not overzealous" mirrors my language back at me but without attaching an actual argument to it.
Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago.
It’s an interesting book for sure, but I had (minor, but still) issues even with the introductory premises. Just a few notes I made from the very first chapter:
- Jaynes used the term “reminiscence” in a way very different from Ballard and claimed no animal is capable of reminiscence. That was a very odd claim overall.
- Then he claimed that if we ever create a language that can express everything, metaphors won’t be possible. Which is, I think, almost obviously false, because many metaphors are constructed artistically, despite having exact terms.
- And he talks about spatialization as a primitive aspect of consciousness, but he seems to talk about relations/connectedness at best.
And so on - I misplaced my notes somewhere and only recovered a few random bits. Still, interesting reading, fun (albeit really questionable) core idea, but those papercuts were kinda off-putting for me.
It was a successful pop-sci book when it came out, but its conclusions continue to be met with a lot of skepticism today.
It's also explored in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", which I assume many here have read. Interesting ideas that are probably more at home in fiction.
And Iam McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary nearly 20 years after Stephenson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
His theory was that the two brain halves communicated through inner voices. Wernickes Area, on the left side, communicated with the similar area on the right side. WA is where we comprehend speech, so Jaynes theorized that was why bicameral people experienced the communication as inner voices.
The research in the new research paper is about a split between front and back of the brain. So something entirely different. That split is an old idea. Jaynes would most likely have known about it. But it wasnt part of his theory.
> they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions
...in a specific region, in a specific time period, immediately before the economic and then societal crash of the eastern Mediterranean that changed culture in the region forever.
The hypothesis breaks down pretty hard when you realize he just kind of handwaves away people in the rest of the world not having any kind of abrupt cut-over in the styles of recorded literature that forms the backbone of his arguments.
Are you sure about this? If you look at the ancient stories in India you can similar phenomena
I think the trouble is once your category is loosey-goosey enough it could be open-ended to the point that anything can fit it.
The fact that overall of recorded history you can find instances of any sort of interaction with something that's felt to be a voice that's independent from one's own subjectivity is open-ended to the point that it can fit the literary and cultural history of basically any civilization on Earth.
What would be more impressive is some additional specificity, any sort of evolutionary mechanism, and any sort of supporting biological data. Otherwise the thing that is being described here isn't a theory, it's barely even vibes. This is to vibes what vibes are to coherently formed thoughts.
Yes, Jaynes used a comprehensive approach, albeit one rooted in literature. I only threw in "Homer" as an example to be clear that "ancient civilizations" referred to bronze age and before, and that this was not the Joe Rogan kind of ancient civilizations.
This is pretty fuzzy and woo woo
It's one of the craziest, most interesting books i've read on the mind. He makes a much stronger argument than can be summarized in a comment. He takes you on a wild journey you are surprisingly ill-equipped for.
And as this complexity develops, there is the first unsureness, the first need for personal gods to intercede with the higher gods, who seem to be receding into the heavens where in one brief millennium they will have disappeared.
This aligns with Christ’s redemptive work. Someone above even mentioned that a change had to happen to all humans about 3000 years ago, that’s about when Christ died (2000 years). It was told his spirit would enter the world when he died.
The thing you are referencing is actually describing the alleged Holy Spirit entering the world:
(With a little help from AI, don’t kill me)
In Christian pneumatology (the study of the Holy Spirit), there is a similar paradigm shift between the ancient world and the New Testament. In the Old Covenant, God's presence was primarily external (pillars of fire, the Ark of the Covenant, stone tablets). With Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, God's presence moves inside human believers ("a new heart... and a new spirit within you," Ezekiel 36:26; 1 Corinthians 6:19).
Development of Conscience: The transition from external command-driven behavior to an internal moral compass echoes the New Testament promise that God's law would be written directly onto human hearts and minds (Jeremiah 31:33).
—-
The change Julian Jaynes observes was actually divinely promised, interesting that it can be measured.
Further, the original study that sees the merging of the two parts of the brain would also fit the Holy Spirit providing reconciliation of how your brain is even wired after it was imparted onto the world. This was all promised , if you believe Christ. It’s even more reassuring that that this biological reconciliation happened around when Christ died , plus or minus a thousand years.
Interesting. Might explain why the cerebellum and cortex work so differently? I wonder what the two ancient nervous systems looked like at the point where they merged.
It might explain ADHD.
Might it? I’m not sure I’m following you. Just because the cerebellum is involved?
Its a joke. You know they say ADHD types made great hunters thousands of years ago, because they can hyperfocus on that gazelle while constantly keeping their head on a swivel.
Original paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 (paywall)
New Scientist Article:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolv...
https://archive.is/1CFX9
Thanks! I've changed the link above to https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolv... from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-09-human-brain.html.
So hindbrain is the OS kernel and forebrain the application server ?
It's a crude analogy, but I would say the hindbrain is more like the system management co-processor or controller that tends to low-level hardware features.
The forebrain is the main processor. It does all the stuff you think of from OS to application, and has some ability to monitor and even interfere in the system management co-processor.
Whether either of these things have interesting internal structure and functional decomposition is left unaddressed. This observation about the progenitor cells is a bit like seeing the BOM that says they come from different suppliers.
I think it's also a bit of guesswork to try to reason out the evolutionary history. I.e. was either unit "in the market" longer and useful on its own, versus essentially complementary parts that just happen to have a divided supply chain! Intuition about evolutionary processes and life makes it really easy to assume the hindbrain is an older, legacy system that existed independently or with other long-lost companion units.
That sounds about right.
Maybe more like the baseband modem in a phone?
I think more like file explorer!
Clearly.. this is not some new revelation, it has been the default assumption for a very long time, probably over a hundred years.
Damage to the hind brain results in behavioural changes that are blatantly different compared to when the "newer" parts of the brain is damaged. The cerebellum literally even has a different color.
Neurosurgeon here: No
Just for context: parent comment was posted when the submission title was "Human brain is two separate organs, research finds". We've since changed it.
(Perhaps the updated title is less objectionable?)
The paper title sits better with me, even as a non-expert: "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain".
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7
Free preprint:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v1
I've added that link to the toptext as well. Thanks!
Ok let's give it a go!
Argument from authority. Elaborate or nobody cares.
regarding the brain, is there a reason your words should be trusted over those of a brain surgeon?
If you are young, this might help you https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...
If you are old, I have nothing at my disposal. You are on your own.
This is pretty basic. One learns this early on if he has actually built something.
> regarding the brain, is there a reason your words should be trusted over those of a brain surgeon?
You thought I had made a claim about the brain. That's interesting.
i have no idea whether the initial commentor is actually a neurosurgeon. applying good faith, he is a neurosurgeon, he saves lives and is deserving of respect. you're completely correct that an appeal to authority is fallacious in an argumentative context. you're also behaving like a dick to somebody who saves lives. don't care who is right or wrong here, made my comment to suggest that you're behaving disrespectfully. if I was unintentionally doing the same, I would appreciate being informed that the same point could have been made in a more respectful manner. although, if you're also at neurosurgeon calibre, then I am incorrect and this comment is redundant.
really? conditional on them actually being neurosurgeon, I'd place a lot more stock on it than on a random headline based on their authority alone. So I, for one, care.
Argument from authority is a bad thing specifically when it's used to make incorrect claims on the basis of authority. But authority as a concept still has plenty of merit.
Authority is a heuristic for which claims are worthy of investigation, not determining their truth
Always be suspicious of people who don't atleast give us even a single valid sentence to construct the chain of thought that would lead to their negation or assertion.
An authority claim by virtue of itself is not worth investigating. Science doesn't work that way. Math doesn't work that way.
> Argument from authority is a bad thing specifically when it's used to make incorrect claims on the basis of authority.
Exactly. Thank you.
> I'd place a lot more stock on it than on a random headline based on their authority alone. So I, for one, care.
I would leave you to contemplate the meaning of what you yourself wrote.
Don't follow. But you omitted the 'conditional on' part so I'm not sure you did either?
A little misleading when they mention 'our' brains, yet the study outlines that even acorn worms have the same structure.
While many comments are about brain lateralization, which this research does not address, an interesting aspect is how much it would lend credence to the "Triune Model" of the brain [0], which is generally described as discredited.
The authors limit their claims to "the longstanding question in developmental biology of how and when different regions of the central nervous system diversify from one another." So folks wanting to see a "lizard brain" in there will have to keep searching.
Edit/Append: Something I will keep an eye out for is how this knowledge changes the understanding of cephalopod brain dev/func. If hemichordates were evolutionarily later than protostomes like an octopus, what will that mean for the types of neural cells available for them? If octopus neurology is more like "forebrain and midbrain—which are both aNE-derived lineages," then does that mean that the "posterior neural ectoderm (pNE)" is evolutionarily later?
0. https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-lizard-brain...
"You Are Two" [0] is a video that talks about what happens when the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is severed.
If you've never seen it I HIGHLY recommend it if only to show how weird our brains actually are.
A good chaser to the above is Peter Watts talk on hive minds [1]. He was a neurology research and the author of the famous sci-fi novel Blindgsight [2]
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8&vl=en
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I
2 - https://amzn.to/4xD40td
Thank you for the link to Watts’ talk. It is a great watch and is certainly a great jumping off point for anyone writing fiction in the field.
It also could be one of the most terrifying talks I’ve ever heard, but since it is eight years old, I am going to just pretend all of the research he mentions fell through and I have nothing worry about.
While worth understanding, it's a completely different topic from the article.