The 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.
Agreed. This isn't being oversold.<p>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.<p>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.
"The brain does it" is not in itself a reason to do the same in AI.<p>Sometimes, what the brain does is genuinely a good solution to a given task - one that's good regardless of whether your neural network is of artificial or biological variety. But sometimes, what the brain does is an evolutionary kludge, or a hack that works around one of the "being made of flesh" issues - of which there are a great many.<p>We have known examples of both - and a few known features that might go either way.<p>The brain does have some known useful features that we are yet to plunder - usually because we know they're there somewhere but not how they work. We don't know how the brain stabilizes online learning, for example. Or what low k-complexity priors and data augmentation processes does it use to enable its sample efficiency.<p>But a two-system split? Useless by itself. Splitting a network in two is easy - but if we don't know what that split does, what it buys us, what useful bias does it impart? We're just adding complexity. See: the investigation into HRMs, and how the "hierarchical" part proved to be a lot less meaningful than anticipated.
> And actually, the fact that the brain is actually two "developmental" systems combined into one seems like big news to me.<p>It was known and discussed in evolutionary-developmental neuroscience, but not much outside that.
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Could 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.<p>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.<p>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.
No one but you said "non important."
How do you have such stunning confidence that you're replying to someone who knows 'nothing about' the subject matter? Maybe he's a neuroscientist.<p>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).
easy there:)
The actual research says something far less clickworthy. Are Stanford's PR dribbles now created by LLMs ?<p>"Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain<p>Abstract
When and how different brain regions diversify from one another remains unresolved.<p>Does a common neural ectoderm progenitor generate the entire brain? Or do multiple neural ectoderm progenitors exist, each restricted to form specific brain regions?<p>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.<p>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."
I 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.<p>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.<p>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.
bioRxiv preprint July 2025 [0]<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2" rel="nofollow">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2</a><p>PDF is free to download.
I've just being doing some googling to try to understand this research better.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
All the comments I see are about is it two organs, or a composite organ.<p>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.
Fun fact: 80% of the brain's neurons are in the cerebellum, not the cortex.<p>In other words: only <20% of pur neuron budget goes to higher cognition (thinking, language, seeing, hearing). 80% is spent on motor skills.
> 80% is spent on motor skills.<p>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.<p>See:<p>- <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4089997/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4089997/</a><p>- <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38663092/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38663092/</a>
Oh, so Moravec’s Paradox is not really a paradox, it’s just an illusion! ;-)
> 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.<p>Very cool. Never thought the brain could have two completely different ancestors
Fun fact: the hindbrain progenitor cell is shaped like a little lizard.
Like the thought:) But actually have read that the hypothesis that the hindbrain (or lower brain) had evolved directly from our lizard ancestors while the upper brain (which does more complex types of thought) evolved later turned out to be wrong. Like the study has shown, they evolved at the same time, and many animals had both. It's just in humans, the upper brain evolved much larger in proportion to the lower brain.<p><a href="https://thebrainscientist.com/2018/04/11/you-dont-have-a-lizard-brain/" rel="nofollow">https://thebrainscientist.com/2018/04/11/you-dont-have-a-liz...</a><p>But yeah, evolution is fascinating.
The lizard brain, not because it resembles the brain of a lizard, but because it's made up of a trillion tiny lizards
I bet you can tune hyperparameters on the MRI so that the resulting image makes the lizard brain look like a lizard, too.
Because they are proudly causing animalistic, degenerate behavior like Lizzo.
and from another post on the front page right now <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735541">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735541</a> :<p>"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."
Why would it be surprising?<p>All parts of the body are built like this. Otherwise we would be blobs.<p>Before becoming two parts they probably were part of the same parent protobrain tissue.<p>If you told me the hindbrain was ectoderm-derived but the forebrain was endoderm-derived, I might raise an eyebrow or two.
> Before becoming two parts they probably were part of the same parent protobrain tissue.<p>Article says they weren't.
> All parts of the body are built like this.<p>Please name one other organ that arises from two separate progenitor cell types. If this is common, I have never heard of it.
Well, your heart contains both mesoderm derived cells (enervation) and ectoderm derived cells (musculature).
Bones, guts, many glands, kidneys.
> 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.<p>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?<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7</a>
[2]: <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721420917687" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721420917687</a>
"Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside" is a really stupid and pretentious article arguing against a straw man.
Interesting, 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.<p>Actually, the upper and lower brains evolved together and most animals have both, including reptiles.<p>Didn't read it thoroughly, but your [2] reference seems to be saying this too.
[2] is an annoying pedantic article that illustrates little beyond a misconception of a misconception.
Related <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolved-from-two-primitive-nervous-systems-that-merged/" rel="nofollow">https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolv...</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533</a>
I 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).
the 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.<p>wikipedia being what it is, on par with secondary literature gives an overview of brain and nervous system origin.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_nervous_system_in_humans" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_nervous_sys...</a><p>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.<p><a href="https://embryology.oit.duke.edu/neuro/neuro.html" rel="nofollow">https://embryology.oit.duke.edu/neuro/neuro.html</a><p>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.<p>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.
>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.<p>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.
Hemispheric 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.
Hm, I’m of two minds on this one.
Thread about this from yesterday: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533</a>
So, what we colloquially call 'reptile brain' turns out to be somewhat accurate.
There is some truth (but not accuracy) to it, but not for this reason.<p>This article is about brainstem (aka hindbrain) vs the rest (midbrain + forebrain).<p>Evolutionally older animal lineages like fish, reptiles, birds all have midbrain + forebrain as well as the brainstem, so reptilian brain != brainstem.<p>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).<p>While the cortex is what gives mammals their intelligence, in birds the pallium evolved in a different way to give them theirs.
am 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:<p>Fish Brain = brain stem + small cortex (+ other parts of brain)<p><pre><code> |
(evolved into)
|
V
</code></pre>
Human Brain = brain stem + gigantic cortex (+ other parts of brain)<p>Sorry, know this is splitting hairs, but just thought it a useful distinction to make.
That's not quite right - a fish does not have a cortex.<p>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.<p>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.
Ah, I stand corrected:) Maybe a better diagram might be to merge our ideas:<p>Fish Brain = brain stem + pallium + other parts of brain[1]<p><pre><code> |
(evolved into)
|
V
</code></pre>
Human Brain = brain stem + gigantic cortex(which directly evolved from the pallium) + other parts of brain[1]<p>Good to know:)<p>[1] Am using "other parts of the brain" to cover any parts of the brain not covered by the brain stem and cortex
no it isnt. it is derived from disparate progenitor cells.<p>"Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain"<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7</a><p>these are not separate organs these are separate "stem cell" populations.<p>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.
I learned of the Triune Brain through Carl Sagan's book <i>The Dragons of Eden</i>. 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.
Elon 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: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html" rel="nofollow">https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html</a>
There's a very interesting split-brain experiment [1] and Joe Scott's video about it [2]<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain</a>
[2]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TYuTid9a6k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TYuTid9a6k</a>
Tabloid like headline...<p>Pity about the dumbed down for dummies, fake marketing from Stanford.
Which 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?
I don’t think the medical community has believed as the article claims for nearly a century.<p>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)
TFA refers to the evolutionarily history of the brain, not the specialised functionality of different parts of the brain.
This isn't about organs but the gene expression that is used to create the organs.
“A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”<p>— James 1:8 (KJV)
Does each separate “organ” here have any relationship to the two separate functions identified in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”?
In 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.
I 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?
I can see how one of these is the gut feelings origin, and other bodily feelings.
Made me think of “Brainscan”, awesome sci-fi from the 90s.
Stanford researcher discovers his head and his ass aren't the same thing.
What 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?
when 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.
I honestly can't wait for AI to analyze the brain so we can truly understand the composition of it.<p>I always come back to this man and it ... no pun intended.. really blows my mind.<p><a href="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" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...</a>
Isn’t it funny how Freud, and probably earlier thinkers, have suggested exactly that the mind is layered like this.
We are going to have to deprecate an idiom or two. "I'm in two minds about something" now gives the wrong meaning.
Terrible headline, cool research.<p>The brain is a <i>composit</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
AI is not a brain, now pay me.
> Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain<p>True title: Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds<p>The HN title misleads people as to the value of the article.
It's cool, but the headline is really pretty misleading.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Didn’t we fix the title yesterday?
That headline's as psyoppy as "schizophrenia".
The title is factually incorrect and is not what the research actually found:<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7</a><p>Title: "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain".<p>"Hence, we postulate the brain is <i>a composite organ</i> emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors; these dual progenitors may be evolutionarily conserved across 550 million years from hemichordates to mammals."
A bicameral mind cool
My GF says I have neither.
[dupe] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533</a>
Not just humans… all mammals.
that'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.
I 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.
I went to see Michael Gazzanigga talk about hemispheric separation some years ago. Fascinating. The two hemispheres can operate separately.
I wasn't expecting to get hit by AI generated slop on Standford's website. At least mark the article as being produced by AI.<p>> “What they found was striking: … These differences essentially locked each progenitor cell into its respective fate, like travelers on parallel tracks that never cross.”<p>The dramatic colon, the obligatory closing metaphor, makes me ill.
How occurate its any experts ?
What a way to oversell the discovery.<p>The reality is:<p><pre><code> * 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.
</code></pre>
The headline should have been: "Human forebrain and hindbrain arise from distinct embryonic progenitor lineages" - not that we have "two organs" in the brain.
> <i>"Human forebrain and hindbrain arise from distinct embryonic progenitor lineages"</i><p>I'd have never clicked that headline nor understood why this finding is important.<p>If you think the original headline is not "truthful" enough, at least do something like "Researchers found the reason why hindbrain cells cannot be grown in a lab and found a way to overcome it"<p>> <i>not that we have "two organs" in the brain.</i><p>Depends what the definition of "organ" actually is. What speaks for different organs here is that the cells both have a different pathway from stem cells <i>and</i> have different evolutionary histories. That is different from other brain regions that may have separate functions but still evolved together.
Saying the truth and communicating well are orthogonal. You can do both.
We should not be wary of loud truths either. Unless we push the envelope we cannot trace back to the essence. Like, as an outsider in this discussion, I am now inclined not only to assess the finding, but also the definition of an organ. The title did good work. Its refutation too. Fencing every statement in unquestionable truth does not make the pursuit of truth stronger.
But there’s rarely one correct answer. Conveying the same approximate message to multiple types of readers is extremely difficult in a handful of words. People with subject matter knowledge are annoyed by headlines written for laypeople that don’t know the jargon or have a mental model of the important concepts that jargon represents. They always seem to miss important distinctions, make poor analogies, or the like. Headline-length blurbs that successfully convey those things to the knowledgeable are often utterly opaque to laypeople causing them to ignore articles about topics they’d find interesting. The only option is trying to estimate the subject matter expertise of the audience, and despite many people in the tech world assuming their software knowledge gives them technical expertise in many non-software fields, the layperson headline is absolutely the best approach here.
“…but LLMs can’t” is the unspoken sticking point.
This is not true. There is a complex relationship between truth and good communication. The relationship is non linear and convoluted and it depends often on the subject of what is being communicated.<p>There are many many cases where lies are easier to communicate than the truth.<p>Take tobacco for instance. For the longest time we did not know it was bad for you. It took decades of epidemiological research and statistical techniques to ascertain that it was bad.<p>The truth was buried in numbers and human knowledge about applied mathematics and statistics. Without centuries of human endeavor to create the concept of science unionized with the rigor of statistics the truth would have remained forever invisible.<p>The sheer complexity of the truth in this case makes is extremely hard to communicate. We mostly trust that smoking is bad based off of the reputation of the researchers who established that fact. But the truth was never really directly communicated to most of us as it involves diving deep into the data.
> There is a complex relationship between truth and *good* communication. [...] There are many many cases where lies are *easier to communicate* than the truth.<p>You're literally conflating good communication with easy communication.
The truth about tobacco was known for years but ignored because 1) industry lobbying and 2) the Nazis were the ones who figured it out, and pushed anti-smoking hard, so smoking became something "our side" did, 3) tobacco was still a huge US export.<p>It was easy to communicate, but we were motivated to not listen.
You understand what I did there?
To me, this suddenly turned the discussion into a fascinating exploration and demonstration of different standards of truthfulness in marketing.
I actually saw the previous version yesterday and read it. Then I saw this one today and thought it was a different finding. Somewhat annoying.
> I'd have never clicked that headline nor understood why this finding is important<p>Does this finding change your life in any meaningful way?
> Armed with this knowledge, the researchers for the first time successfully coaxed human pluripotent stem cells (a kind of cell that can create any cell in the human body) to become functional hindbrain motor neurons in the laboratory.<p>...<p>> The research also has implications for investigating treatments for SMA, ALS and other conditions affecting the brain stem. Until now, studying these diseases has been nearly impossible because scientists cannot obtain brain stem tissue from living patients. The ability to grow these neurons in a dish opens new possibilities for understanding what goes wrong.<p>But no, nothing to see here, not worth our time for this overblown article apparently ...
this is a great walk through the curiousity of the hindbrain: <a href="https://radiolab.org/podcast/song-of-the-cerebellum" rel="nofollow">https://radiolab.org/podcast/song-of-the-cerebellum</a><p>The findings arn't exactly "new" but the medical science about it is definitely lagging current research.
> I'd have never clicked that headline nor understood why this finding is important.<p>Why do you think it's important?
In the context of a link aggregator, it’s arguably the only thing that matters
You don't think it's important?
When I studied neuroanatomy in the early 2000s it was already taught that the evolutionary history of the forebrain (from comparative anatomy) seems to have invaded the hindbrain and seems to control it like a puppet. It's nice to see this sort of confirmation but it doesn't strike me as an earth-shaking discovery except that it might give some insights for differential drug targeting.
Nonetheless, there is some truth in the headline.<p>When an organ is known to be generated from 2 distinct embryonic preforms, which become merged and integrated at a later stage of development, there is a likelihood that in some distant ancestor the integration into a single organ was much less advanced than now and possibly the two parts remained as relatively separated organs even during adulthood.<p>There are many groups of animals that include both some species that have retained a more primitive condition, where some nervous ganglia have remained separated, while other species have a derived condition, where those nervous ganglia have fused into a single ganglion.<p>In this case it is not known for sure what happened, because the early evolution of the nervous system, from a sensory structure embedded in the skin to a complex internal system that mediates the communication between sensors and motor or secretory organs, is still poorly understood.<p>In any case, this research confirms that the differences between forebrain+midbrain (which includes the cerebrum) and hindbrain (which includes the cerebellum) are very important, because they become established very early during the development of the embryo, at a time when the progenitors of many organs are still interchangeable.
Given the parallel example cited in the article of jellyfish having two spatially separate organs, & the subsequent speculation that our own ancestors could also have had spacially separate anterior & posterior masses, the title doesn't really seem unreasonable in its hyperbole.<p>While it might not be perfectly accurate it's hardly misleading.
I found the title confusing, at the very least because it can be argued that the two brain hemispheres are two organs already, as they operate independently when severed from each other.
Humans also have a gut brain. So maybe we have 3 seperate brains?<p>The most important question: are they all conscious?
Though I agree with the detailed differentiation, still for the headline purpose a generic one that resonates with people easily isn't a bad choice
I think "Human brain <i>evolved from</i> two separate organs" would've been more accurate and sufficiently simple/short for a headline, but I guess it won't fly either due to <i>political</i> reasons.
But the evolution isn’t necessarily the important part, it’s the two parts having separate development processes in modern day humans that is notable.
> I think "Human brain evolved from two separate organs" would've been more accurate and sufficiently simple/short for a headline, but I guess it won't fly either due to political reasons.<p>I don't agree. For that you need to distort the definition of what an organ is to comply the requirement for two separate organs with distinct origin, genetic, and biochemical traits, and different function and responsibilities to somehow remain classified as the same organ.
Lying is always a bad choice. The paper in Nature says<p>"Hence, we postulate <i>the brain is a composite organ</i> emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors; these dual progenitors may be evolutionarily conserved across 550 million years from hemichordates to mammals."
If they had written instead:<p>"Human brain <i>was</i> two separate organs"<p>Then, both attention grabbig and true?
Human Brain Evolved From Two Separate Organs.
Probably not, because by the time hominids were a thing, it was one.<p>(if I'm reading parent poster correctly)
Are there other composite organs?
Does the adrenal gland count?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophore" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophore</a>
Yes, but this is left for the next years because they give only one Nobel preis per year.
I don't have a problem with the 'two organs making one' framing. The fact that they are 'symbiotic' now doesn't change that. In fact it helps me understand two key facts. One can't grow out of the other, and they work differently. Great
The Portuguese Man o’ War[0] is a symbiotic organism. If you want to get technical, I guess we are, as well. We’re really kind of fascinating meatbags.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war</a>
Yeah, this is a frequent failure of science communication. Misleading clickbait overselling a paper that made real progress in some capacity. I'd be more interested in hearing the truth of the matter and about the researchers passion for their study area. Spinning everything into some high stakes breakthrough that fundamentally changes our understanding of the world just makes me feel like my time was maliciously wasted and that I shouldn't click on news about science.
That's true, and hype to secure future funding is probably related somehow.<p>The article did change an understanding about worlds though, it's just the inner one.<p>I thought the article title was ok, and material was accessible. I didn't have to go look up 15 new words. I don't mind learning new words, just not all the time. I have seen the hype based articles you mentioned in the past.
Main issue I have with the title is it immediately reminded me about McGilchrist's "The Divided Brain" and I thought they meant the two halves - but that is not the case.<p>So the question still remains...<p><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain</a>
I'm sorry, it just sounds like you're mad at medical researcher for trying to make their research more accessible?<p>What do you mean by oversell? And why do you think the general public would be more apt to understand "distinct embryonic progenitor lineages" than "two organs"?<p>What exactly is the problem here? You think medical researcher are using medial nomenclature wrong?<p>Honestly write a paper about it then.
They also use this result to great hindbrain neurons in the lab for the first time, so it's a strikingly useful discovery.<p>I think it's also fair to say they are different organs based on the developmental physiology. Many other organs come from distinct embryonic cell lines.
But third item means that there are two organs almost by definition, so original headline maybe slightly sensationalist, but not technically false.
A physical connection and collaborative function aren't enough to define a single organ anymore. It must also share a developmental and evolutionary origin.
This is meaningless semantic drama over a meaningful discovery. From a biological and medical perspective, the collective term "organ" is pretty useless, if there is a distinct progenitor lineage. For the sake of a simplified explanation for the public, describing this discovery as finding "two organs" is absolutely fair.<p>A similar example: The melanocytes in the skin originate from the neural crest, not the epidermis. As a significant consequence, melanocytes share cell attributes with neurons. One of these attributes is the ability to infiltrate other tissues. Because of that, malignant transformation of melanocytes has vastly different consequences, compared to epithelial cells. If you asked your doctor why squamous cell cancer and melanoma have such different prognoses, describing your skin as effectively "two organs" would be illustrative and easy to understand, without getting into developmental biology.
Often the headline is not created by the author of the article.<p>Also newspaper headlines used to give a quick summary of the story, online articles as you say, clickbait.
Instead of starting a meaningless argument about the title, try reading the article. It explains the significance of this discovery.
Agree on the ancient knowledge and some other interesting aspects I discovered when working with a Doctor who modeled 3D Brain apertures with me.<p>Comments somewhere down below has details.
It's much simpler to change "is" to "was"
It’s the PR arm of a university, they always do this.
Pretty much, and they've less shame than a British tabloid in how far they go.<p>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.<p>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.
No one will want to open your headline.
I think you're right. And I would even assume that, should the article be from Fox News (just an example), every other commenter that excuses the title would have yelled at journalism slop, clickbait and whatnot.<p>But that's stanford.edu, so we must tread lightly.
>The headline should have been: "Human forebrain and hindbrain arise from distinct embryonic progenitor lineages" - not that we have "two organs" in the brain.<p>Well we see why you're not a journalist.
I've found it useful to think in terms of how such structures might have evolved. The beginning state is always something very simple: the first nerve. It must go from A to B. Perhaps from a food sensing area to a muscle. Sense food, stop moving, something like that. Organisms could evolve multiple copies of that structure: N nerves going from A(n) to B(n). At some point the next invention arises: some logic gate type thing that branches and/or combines nerves. So now sensing food can make movement stop and also digestion begin. Or food response can be attenuated during the day time. And so on. There's no reason why you'd have exactly one of these "nerve processor" nodes. There's also no reason why several different kinds of them and different instances might evolve. They're useful. Then at some point the next discovery is made: by combining several nerve processor nodes in close proximity, with their own inter-node connections, you can perform more complex processing. You've now got a proto-brain. But again there's nothing to say you have exactly one of these things, or that they're exact replicas of each other.
The audience for a news headline is a layperson who may have no knowledge of or context to infer past factoids about brain regions or evolutionary biology.<p>There’s a balance between being informative to the audience and satisfying for pedants.
If the two parts arise independently, then the headline may be a bit clunky but it is technically correct.
Agreed. Anybody who looks at a picture of the brain can see the cerebellum (part of the hindbrain) is obviously a different organ. I only clicked the link to find out if there was any new science buried under the hype of the title.
we already knew the last part, they’ve just defined it a little better
I mean, I learned a bunch of neat new stuff, so I’m excited!
Oh, I think we could crank that headline even harder while still keeping one toe on the truth. For example:<p>"<i>Elon Musk's</i> Brain is Two Separate Organs"
Additionally the only images in the linked article are also face pics of the researchers instead of anything on the information about said research.<p>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.<p>Self aggrandizing articles with misleading headlines is giving me 2 triggers for not trusting the content.
> 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.<p>Wait, you think the article was written by the researchers?<p>You know, it's also difficult to trust someone's criticisms when they misassign responsibility. Just like anti-vaxxers do.
I'm pretty sure the third thesis has been taught in my university physiology classes 20 years ago, too.
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Wintermute and neuromancer!
This isn't peer reviewed, just a press release. 10 other "papers" will be published in the next 2 weeks counterfinding anything in this post.<p>Science moves forward yet again with a few backward steps.
Here is the peer reviewed publication in Nature Neuroscience:<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7</a><p>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.<p>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.
no idea what you're talking about.<p>watson and crick's paper was not peer reviewed, neither were darwin's papers.<p>not sure what you think happens in peer review but it's probably overrated.
Darwin submitted and presented his work to the Linnean Society of London — with papers by
Darwin published by the society.<p>Darwin wrote his book <i>Origin of Species</i> the following year.
The problem right now is that there aren't enough peer reviewers.
And that's why we oftentimes talk about "brains" in the plural
I worked with a doctor once to build a 3D Model of the brain apertures.<p>Disclaimer: the work presents these as spiritual/meditational reference points, not established neuroanatomical structures.<p>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.<p>Some details here:
<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N9KxIWNF_z9twZurRgkTLljfTRJmoQZaeU3p2nIuOUk/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N9KxIWNF_z9twZurRgkTLljf...</a>
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