When I studied neuroanatomy in the earl 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.

> "Human forebrain and hindbrain arise from distinct embryonic progenitor lineages"

I'd have never clicked that headline nor understood why this finding is important.

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"

> not that we have "two organs" in the brain.

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 and have different evolutionary histories. That is different from other brain regions that may have separate functions but still evolved together.

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.

Nonetheless, there is some truth in the headline.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While it might not be perfectly accurate it's hardly misleading.

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

Often the headline is not created by the author of the article.

Also newspaper headlines used to give a quick summary of the story, online articles as you say, clickbait.

It's much simpler to change "is" to "was"

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

They also use this result to great hindbrain neurons in the lab for the first time, so it's a strikingly useful discovery.

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.

I'm sorry, it just sounds like you're mad at medical researcher for trying to make their research more accessible?

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"?

What exactly is the problem here? You think medical researcher are using medial nomenclature wrong?

Honestly write a paper about it then.

But third item means that there are two organs almost by definition, so original headline maybe slightly sensationalist, but not technically false.

Instead of starting a meaningless argument about the title, try reading the article. It explains the significance of this discovery.

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.

So the question still remains...

https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain

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.

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.

Agree on the ancient knowledge and some other interesting aspects I discovered when working with a Doctor who modeled 3D Brain apertures with me.

Comments somewhere down below has details.

No one will want to open your headline.

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.

It’s the PR arm of a university, they always do this.

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.

But that's stanford.edu, so we must tread lightly.

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

If the two parts arise independently, then the headline may be a bit clunky but it is technically correct.

I mean, I learned a bunch of neat new stuff, so I’m excited!

Additionally the only images in the linked article are also face pics of the researchers instead of anything on the information about said research.

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.

Oh, I think we could crank that headline even harder while still keeping one toe on the truth. For example:

"Elon Musk's Brain is Two Separate Organs"

I'm pretty sure the third thesis has been taught in my university physiology classes 20 years ago, too.

Fun fact: the hindbrain progenitor cell is shaped like a little lizard.

and from another post on the front page right now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735541 :

"Nervous systems are typically defined as networks of neurons that communicate across synapses. But Burkhardt’s lab found something unique in ctenophores: Beneath the animal’s outer surface is a nerve net (pink mesh in this 3D reconstruction) whose neurons are connected by continuous cytoplasm — but with no synapses between them. “I don’t think any other animal has a nervous system like that,” Burkhardt said. Because ctenophores are one of the earliest branches of the animal family tree, the finding indicates that evolution may have crafted nervous systems twice: in ctenophores, and separately in jellyfish and all other animals."

Why would it be surprising?

All parts of the body are built like this. Otherwise we would be blobs.

Before becoming two parts they probably were part of the same parent protobrain tissue.

If you told me the hindbrain was ectoderm-derived but the forebrain was endoderm-derived, I might raise an eyebrow or two.

It really fascinates me how dumb HN community is considering they know nothing about brain on the level of actual experts yet readily comment it as “non important” based on vibes.

If this is not your area of expertise why comment with stunning confidence on something you have no idea about?

Ego?

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.

This suggested a sequence of events, causes and effects, that somehow our minds today can be evolved from a singular 'step' within growth. Only our brains seems have this requirement.

So this requirement, in and of itself, is interesting and newsworthy. For whatever purposes, it's 2 separate systems that many living organisms evolve in the same way. It's 2 steps, for some physical reason.

> 80% is spent on motor skills.

The cerebellum isn't just for motor skills. It's more of a place where very commonly used patterns get a bunch of dedicated wetware so the computation is superfast and precise. In an (undoubtedly very limited) analogy a bunch of FPGAs to complement the general processing. It does make a lot of sense to use this functionality for motor skills, though.

See:

- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4089997/

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38663092/

Oh, so Moravec’s Paradox is not really a paradox, it’s just an illusion! ;-)

"Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside" is a really stupid and pretentious article arguing against a straw man.

[2] is an annoying pedantic article that illustrates little beyond a misconception of a misconception.

I'm of more than two minds all the time. (A bunch of my friends are, too...)

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.

There is some truth (but not accuracy) to it, but not for this reason.

This article is about brainstem (aka hindbrain) vs the rest (midbrain + forebrain).

Evolutionally older animal lineages like fish, reptiles, birds all have midbrain + forebrain as well as the brainstem, so reptilian brain != brainstem.

Where there is some truth to our older "reptilian" brain is that the part of the forebrain called the pallium, that exists even in fish (& reptiles), has much expanded/evolved in mammals giving us our cortex and hippocampus, so you could kinda say that we have a reptilian brain + cortex. Note though that mammals didn't evolve from reptiles - they evolved in parallel from a common ancestor, so maybe better to say we have a fish brain + cortex (& hippocampus).

While the cortex is what gives mammals their intelligence, in birds the pallium evolved in a different way to give them theirs.

TFA refers to the evolutionarily history of the brain, not the specialised functionality of different parts of the brain.

The digestive tract could also be seen as a single organ since they are connected. I think the deciding criteria should be the one applied in this study, i.e., how an organ develops.

Not to mention the gut brain-- That's the organ I blame for the ice cream I just ate

The impact is rather that is explains the failure of attempts to cultivate cell cultures of brainstem cells.

Actually, the mind should only exist in the forebrain:0

Here is the peer reviewed publication in Nature Neuroscience:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7

The peer reviewed publication is linked to from the press release. The press release's headline does somewhat overhype up the actual finding though. The actual finding is that different parts of the brain arise from different neural ectoderm progenitors, which explains why it’s so hard to get a forebrain neuron to behave like a hindbrain neuron and vice versa in the lab. The paper then postulates that this difference in progenitors resembles being two different organs evolutionarily, but this is not really the most important part of the paper.

BTW I suspect that this finding comes as completely unsurprising to biologists and the medical field generally. I'm not in either field, but even in high school biology we learned that the brain stem is behaviorally and structurally radically different from the rest of the brain, to the point where it seems almost obvious in hindsight that it's a different cell line and potentially has a different evolutionary history from the rest of the brain.

no idea what you're talking about.

watson and crick's paper was not peer reviewed, neither were darwin's papers.

not sure what you think happens in peer review but it's probably overrated.