The reality is:
* Different brain regions have different functions: ancient knowledge.
* Different regions contain distinct cell types and molecular programs: also well established.
* Anterior and posterior brain structures may trace back to fundamentally separate progenitor lineages that were independently specified very early in evolution and development: that's the interesting new result.
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.
"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."
While it might not be perfectly accurate it's hardly misleading.
When submitting, one can try to replace the title with something honest. HN does not favor that, mostly due to submitters having their own biases.
The best tactic is finding a higher quality article on the subject, to submit instead. That's uncertain, takes time, and may run into paywall issues.
"Elon Musk's Brain is Two Separate Organs"
I want to trust science and dislike anti vaxxers but it’s difficult to argue against them when researchers act like the caricature they are mocked as.
Self aggrandizing articles with misleading headlines is giving me 2 triggers for not trusting the content.
Very cool. Never thought the brain could have two completely different ancestors
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.
"Nervous systems are typically defined as networks of neurons that communicate across synapses. But Burkhardt’s lab found something unique in ctenophores: Beneath the animal’s outer surface is a nerve net (pink mesh in this 3D reconstruction) whose neurons are connected by continuous cytoplasm — but with no synapses between them. “I don’t think any other animal has a nervous system like that,” Burkhardt said. Because ctenophores are one of the earliest branches of the animal family tree, the finding indicates that evolution may have crafted nervous systems twice: in ctenophores, and separately in jellyfish and all other animals."
We fail to imagine how much time takes to „craft a nervous system”.
Super scary how small are we in big scheme of things.
at one point I learned that it would only take a few hundred thousand years to evolve an eye, and time felt much deeper.
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2
PDF is free to download.
In other words: only <20% of pur neuron budget goes to higher cognition (thinking, language, seeing, hearing). 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:
I'm not sure the actual article in Nature Neuroscience [1] actually says that. I remember "Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside" [2] from a few years ago, but I'm not sure where the dissonance comes from: my own misunderstanding, the press release using a popular but flawed model to communicate with laymen, or these two articles being in direct contradiction with each other?
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 [2]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721420917687
Surely the interesting thing is the ability to grow hindbrain cells in vitreo. That's what's potentially going to lead to the cure of lots of things, not whether 1=2.
Not sure how much the digestive neurons are involved with hunger actually, I thought its role was more about telling you which foods make you nauseous so you won't eat them, or subconsciously register which nutrients various foods have so you'ld crave the ones compensating for shortages more.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7
Title: "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain".
"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."
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.
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.
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.
Science moves forward yet again with a few backward steps.
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.
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.
One problem is that there's no good incentive to spend significant time doing good peer review.