Said professor of developmental biology Kyle Loh, quoted in "Brain made up of two distinct organs evolving independently/Scientists have discovered the brain is made of separate systems, solving a longstanding riddle and aiding research into conditions like motor neurone disease" (London Times).
It's so convenient I feel skeptical. What wouldn't be ethical becomes ethical.
[T]he two regions — one made up by our forebrain and midbrain, and one made up by our hindbrain — are “two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together”, researchers from Stanford University said.... The hind part of our brains is linked with our more primitive, automatic functions such as breathing, sleeping and the beating of our heart. It is also linked to hunger and is targeted by GLP-1 weight-loss medications. The forebrain is associated with our more intellectual functions, linked to creativity, abstract thought and mathematics.
I — the "I" that is writing this — am here in the forebrain + midbrain, because that's the brain that can do things like write. But how would I know if there were some other consciousness riding along in my head in the hindbrain? Is it spying on me? Does it approve of me? It's such an invasion of my privacy! But, no, it's in charge of such lowly tasks — breathing, heart-beating — that no consciousness would arise, right? But you cannot know the nature of this hypothetical hindmind. Unable to interact with the outside world, if it existed, what would it do?
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Sounds too extreme an interpretation. What they are studying matters, but not as much as they are pretending.
The different brains and the different brain cells evolve as a single unit so far as survival goes. So they evolve to work together and are, therefore, fundamentally linked.
Yes, there may be different types of cells, and we should understand the differences, but that is only so important. The body is full of different types of things: bone, blood, tissue, water, bacteria, .... They all have to work together as a system, so this is not very new. We have just found one more difference.
The brain is made up of multiple different "organs" if you want to discuss it that way.
As we gain more fidelity on how the brain works people are going to get mad. Standard stuff.
You make decisions in your animal brain and those decisions are based on identity.
The pre-frontal cortex is where we plan and set goals and lie to ourselves.
My basic objection is the notion that the "brain is two distinct organs evolving independently." This is just plain false. They are not independent at all. Evolution occurs at the organism level, and they are both part of the same organism.
I also suspect they are overstating their incremental contribution. Scientists have studied for a long time how a fetus develops -- what grows first, then what grows next, etc. I'm guessing they have known for quite a while that the brain develops from two different sources. So I'm guessing their contribution is that they have definitively shown that they grow from two different types of cells. But how different? I can't even guess.
I don’t think this is novel. Haven’t we always known that there are two parts? The part that swerves your car to avoid a head on collision and the part that gazes at the sky making animals out of clouds.
This raises an interesting evolutionary question: how recent is this "two brain cells" structure? Is it unique to humans? Was it present going way back, but is much more developed in humans?
Somebody ask an AI about this. I'm mentally all tuckered out by even my tiny exertions this morning.
What is the ethical issue? Growing brain cells in a petri dish?
Among the stem cell lines that emerge during gastrulation are the neural stem cells. The neural stem cells are capable of producing all of the different cells that make up the brain and central nervous system, and for this reason the neural stem cells are usually called the neural progenitor cells.
The region of the embryo containing the neural progenitor cells is referred to as the neural plate. The first sign of neural tube development is the appearance of two ridges that form along the two sides of the neural plate on approximately E21. The neural progenitor cells lie between the two ridges. Over the course of several days, the ridges rise, fold inward and fuse to form a hollow tube.
The neural progenitor cells in the most rostral region of the neural tube will give rise to the brain, while more caudally positioned cells will give rise to the hindbrain and spinal column.
Just before neural tube closure, the anterior end of the tube begins to expand forming the three primary brain vesicles, or pouches. The most anterior of these embryonic brain vesicles is called the “prosencephalon” which is the embryonic precursor of the forebrain. The middle vesicle is the “mesencephalon” which is the precursor of midbrain structures, and the most posterior is the “rhombencephalon” which will become the hindbrain.
These three segments further subdivide and by the end of the embryonic period the five secondary brain vesicles are present. The prosencephalon divides into the “telencephalon” and the “diencephalon”, and the rhombencephalon divides into the “metencephalon” and “myelencephalon”. The mesencephalon does not further divide. These five subdivisions are aligned along the rostral-caudal axis of the embryo and establish the primary organization of the central nervous system
I am hereby calling for the immediate establishment of an international body with authority to regulate the hind brain...and everything behind that...all the way back.
"But how would I know if there were some other consciousness riding along in my head in the hindbrain. Is it spying on me? Does it approve of me?"
I highly recommend Steven Pinker's book "How the Mind Works." He gets into these things and I find it convincing.
Pinker has the basic model that the brain is a collection of different "things" that have evolved to be useful in various ways. They are a hodge podge that arise for various different reasons and so have a hodge podge of characteristics, and their interactions are complex. Just like a lot of other characteristics of various animals that have evolved for various reasons. They interact in a hodge podge of different ways too, so it can, kind of, make sense to say things like one is spying on the other. It's a mish mosh.
It'd be kind of cool to have the hind brain of your parasitic twin.
Thanks Sella Turcica.
So, in what sense are the cells that give rise to the hindbrain different from the forebrain cells?
That's the problem with AI. There's no AHB to provide balance. It's like, AI gets all excited and starts destroying humanity and stuff and you're like, Hey, AI, take a breath, but it can't because there's no AHB...you see?
So you geeks have your assignment. Get on that AHB. Let's go. Chop chop.
Science doesn't, can't discern origin and expression. That said, it's akin to separating the fetus (i.e. scientific term-of-art) from the baby from the person in a biological apartheid. Also, climate and weather, sex and gender, anthropogenic and artificial intelligence, etc. There are a basket of correlations. A constructed model to serve convenience and other motives. Ethics is a relative state and process of morality.
"What is the ethical issue? Growing brain cells in a petri dish?"
Experimenting on a human being. I'm seeing the same possible sleight of hand I saw with those mice with some human DNA that we were told didn't result in any "human behavior."
Blogged 2 days ago, here: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2026/09/it-may-have-large-proportion-of-its.html
The biological apartheid of the whole and parts is an article of faith.
How long before the NYT prints an article saying experts believe that conservatives have larger hindbrains and smaller forebrains?
"This raises an interesting evolutionary question: how recent is this "two brain cells" structure? Is it unique to humans? Was it present going way back, but is much more developed in humans?"
From the article: "They also looked back over 550 million years of evolution and found the same two-brain pattern in chickens, zebrafish and a type of marine invertebrate called an acorn worm. In jellyfish, their nervous systems are more clearly separated, located at different ends of their body.
“Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” Loh said. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”"
A mother's egg and a father's sperm in conjugal bliss and matrimonial union evolving until entropy do them part.
"It's so convenient I feel skeptical."
This intuition makes sense. They are trumpeting something unsurprising and likely trivial. So maybe there is another motivation at work.
"We're not growing human brains! We would NEVER do that. We are just growing this one little cell that is TOTALLY different from those important front-brain cells that make humans human. Perish the thought! They are TOTALLY different!"
I’d like to donate every one of my brain organs for auction to benefit the animals.
Inferential deduction through pattern matching like clouds in the sky, grains of sand on a beach, etc, a rorschach test.
Your forebrain likes to see your mouth closed when you breathe. The hindbrain doesn't give shit.
The forebrain is kind of fussy. The hindbrain is pretty laid back.
It's kind of like those guys in that movie The Odd Couple.
How is growing brain cells in a petri dish ethically different from growing bone cells or skin cells or nerve cells?
How would Steven Pinker answer my questions?
I asked Grok and got this: "The mind is not one occupant in a control room. It is a collection of specialized computational systems that evolved for different jobs and do not all report to the same “I.” Most of what the brain does is inaccessible to the speaking, writing, self-narrating process you identify as yourself. That is why you would not know if another process were running. Inaccessibility is the normal design, not a mystery.He splits “consciousness” into different things. The tractable one is access: which information gets into the limited executive/workspace that plans, talks, and constructs a story of a single self. Autonomic regulation, much of perception, and a lot of motivation never enter that workspace. You do not feel your medulla keeping you alive, and you have no channel by which a hypothetical hindbrain process could “spy” on your thoughts or issue an opinion you could hear. There is no inner mailbox between those systems and the verbal self.The sense that there is one unified agent who is in charge, and who would notice a roommate, is itself a construction. Competing processes win, then the narrative system rationalizes the outcome as “I decided.” Conflict between modules (appetite vs. diet, fear vs. plan) can feel like parts of you at odds. That is not the same as a second subject sitting in the hindbrain passing judgment. So Pinker’s answer to your precise questions is roughly: you wouldn’t know, because most mental work is sealed off from the self that asks the question; “spying” and “approval” are social-mind capacities of the systems that are you, not something a life-support organ would be doing; and there is no good reason to treat an inaccessible regulator as another consciousness riding along. Sentience itself—whether it feels like something to be that other circuitry—he treats as the leftover mystery science may not be able to close."
That "answer" is the same as the question.
"They also looked back over 550 million years of evolution and found the same two-brain pattern in chickens, zebrafish and a type of marine invertebrate called an acorn worm."
Dinosaurs had multiple brains too IIRC. Octopuses use distributed processing IIRC. No particular reason all of the brain function has to be in one place. We even talk about people who "think" with various non-brain organs.
There has been a lot of study about the left brain vs the right brain. Now we have fore and aft.
If you're doodling and you find you have drawn a picture of a dick and balls, that came from the right rear corner of your brain, probably.
Evolution in conception, continuing over a day, six weeks to viability, a trimester for good measure, three until we are fit for presentation.
We don’t hate “scientists” enough. Especially the kind that are doing “important stuff”
Now, I'm in a long conversation with Grok about the hindbrain, including which pronouns to use to refer to it... him... her....
Is this really newsworthy? I recall having this discussion 50 years ago while studying neurophysiology.
The father's sperm engenders biological apartheid. Toxic masculinity is a conception that persists through expression over decades of human evolution in mind and body in both boys and girls. A colonial legacy with equitable and inclusive roots.
Yeah, well I suppose ignorance does create a lot of confusion. I would hardly call running all of your life support your ability to stay calm and your ability to violently react to an absolute emergency situation in an instant without hesitation as lowly tasks. We can actually communicate with the hind brain. I do it all the time. The Hairs that stand up on the back of your neck is your hindbrain communicating to you via the sympathetic nervous system that distributes powerful electrical signals down your spinal column. That gut instinct, it is real. It actually comes from the hind brain via the vagus nerve. That's what the Yogi Masters are trying to do to achieve enlightenment. It's exactly the goal of gut health. Words aren't the only way to communicate.
Now, if you want to discuss, what's really interesting about this discovery is that the hindbrain has a completely different blood-brain barrier that is much more permissive than the fore brain brain and midbrain blood-brain barrier.
This indicates that The hindbrain is much more susceptible to gut dysbiosis and chemical exposures as the toxins generated by the ultra processed modern American diet can easily pass into the hindbrain. This is the linkage to the Genesis of neurological diseases like ALS and Parkinson's.
The vagus nerve, AKA rest and digest, is entirely controlled by the hindbrain. Getting control of your vagus nerve and making it dominate over the sympathetic nervous system is the key to mental health. It's directly related to the youngin theory on the source of modern psychosis and mental illness and depression.
Decibels is abbreviated dB to prevent doodlers from making penises in books.
Jungian
Them. A diversity of cells, minority of one, made whole in social consensus.
A brain simple enough to understand would be too simple to understand itself.
Just think about it. Would you want any conscious control that could possibly stop your heart from beating? It's a Fail-Safe system having them separated. Anti-Fragile I believe is the catchphrase that's most appropriate.
Howard said...
Now, if you want to discuss, what's really interesting about this discovery is that the hindbrain has a completely different blood-brain barrier that is much more permissive than the fore brain brain and midbrain blood-brain barrier.
The difference between the Vagus and prefrontal and the links to diet are really causing cognitive dissonance right now.
The food that releases dopamine sends those signals from the mouth.
The food that releases serotonin sends those signals from the gut through the vagus.
Our brains started shrinking when we domesticated grains.
Why are the two different parts back and front and not side to side? I mean the brain has left and right halves with different functions. It would sort of make sense if the two different progenitor cells were each responsible for one of the two hemispheres.
Ok’d like to see whether their very convenient results are reproducible and not more junk science.
I’d like to see …
Maternal mitochondria are in both brain systems which come from a single egg. You yourself formed your own body starting as a single egg. Once a sperm crossed the cell wall of the egg you were, you closed the border to all future sperm with a chemical change in your cell wall composition, sending up a flash of joy from all the zinc atoms in you at the same time. You then increased the number of your cells by dividing the egg and set off to find the womb which you had to reach before your efforts exhausted all the stored food in your body, which the egg had saved up. As you went along you divided your cells to create more cells with which to form an apparatus which would allow you to attach onto cells in the womb so that you could finally stop living off the stored supplies of the egg and gain a reliable, enduring source of nourishment. Arriving at the edge of the womb you rolled forward into the void, fell, and found a niche in which you could rest. At once you attached your apparatus to a nearby cell and flashed a message to your mother: "I am here, send some food." She heard your cry and stocked her pantry for you for the first but not the last time. This time she did it by a series of hormonal changes which increased the flow of food precursors to the womb cells. You meanwhile used some other of the cells you had been making by division to make an expandable little tent for yourself in which to live for the next 8 months and 25 days. You had travelled, grown, found food, contacted another human being with a request, and constructed a shelter. You were 5 days old. Soon you would set to work to construct not just one brain but two. You who read me are here today and so it follows that you once did all this. Relying on systems rather than just human consciousness has been a way of life from the beginning for all of us.
Some of us get accused of thinking with our hindbrain all the time.
Science!
Making "The Man With Two Brains" a documentary film.
In spite of brain differences, men and women have the same average IQ. Not so amazing actually since they add boy questions and girl questions to the IQ test so that boys and girls average the same. It's a calibration and not a result.
The biologist Lynn Margulies put forward an analogous theory when she proposed that some of the the organelles in the human cell had once been separate species with their own DNA and that each of our cells is the product of evolutionary symbiosis. This has been supported by the discovery of mitochondrial DNA, passing via the maternal line, and central to the Krebs Cycle.
Luckily, nobody has yet worried about the ethical quandaries of interference with mitochondrial consciousness.
I think it's silly to view growing and studying human cells as 'experimenting on humans'.
"the hindbrain has a completely different blood-brain barrier that is much more permissive than the fore brain brain and midbrain blood-brain barrier."
Really?
The idea of two brains, a right brain and a left brain, is a familiar one. So is the idea of a reptilian back brain. And which half or quarter gives us the messages from the gods?
It would really suck to have to consciously tell your heart to beat and your lungs to breathe every second of every day.
The two "different" progenitor cells almost certainly have a common progenitor neuronal cell, so my instinct is that the authors of this research are probably exaggerating their results just a little bit.
Rosa Parks is turning over in her grave.
Rh said... "Decibels is abbreviated dB to prevent doodlers from making penises in books."
YouTube: kIDS have not changed. And that's probably a good thing.
The key to evolution is differentiation explained with a wave of the hand and nod of the head.
You could make a fortune writing books about a scale of left to right and fore to hind where you make a fake text that gives you a rating of wether you are a left hind or a right fore and then describe you like a horoscope, Joe is a ceo so he is left fore and makes sequential decisions without worrying about his bodily functions. Sam is a murderer in prison and he is right hind because he has a primitive emotional connection to his victims. You could be rich. Call it the DIPPY scale, dual integrated personality profile yield.
But when I was young I saw a black and white aspirin commercial that showed video inside the human head and it showed all the operators in white coats reporting and controlling the brain. So it’s really just a control room of people changing dials to control minor pain.
I am a right hind, because I spend all my time trying to make my heart beat in artistic patterns.
Can one support removal of a clump of cells from a female uterus and also decry as unethical the growth of a clump of cells sourced from a human hindbrain? What wonders this world holds!
Josephbleau said...
I am a right hind, because I spend all my time trying to make my heart beat in artistic patterns.
I tried that and now I'm on some serious drugs.
We have a brain in our butt, too:
https://www.livescience.com/62683-colon-brain-neuron-firing-pattern-detected.html
Mary Shelley knew it a long time ago. Do not trust-ist scientists. after all, they gave us the hydrogen bomb.
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