Neat, has nothing to do with your two hemispheres if you haven’t read the article.
Amazing what one can learn in the details. TIL that face musculature is controlled by the hindbrain. I always thought they were run like all the other actively controlled muscles.
Headless chickens are a good example of this. If the chop leaves enough of the brain stem intact, then the now headless chicken can still run around and “live” for some time. Since “running around like a headless chicken” is a saying in several languages, this probably wasn’t an ultra rare occurrence.
I’m in two minds about this.
Wow, that was a really fascinating article. I suppose this will also factor in to understanding the differing ability for higher thought between us and other animals.
It’s not unique to humans at all. They originally found the two types of brain cells by looking at mouse embryos. Then,
"Finally, the researchers looked back over 550 million years of evolutionary time. They found the same two-origin brain pattern in chickens; zebrafish; and, remarkably, in acorn worms, tiny creatures living on the ocean floor that share a distant common ancestor with humans. Jellyfish, which diverged from humans about 600 to 700 million years ago, have two nervous systems 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.”
We’ve long known the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain control different things, we just didn’t know the hindbrain neuron cells evolved so fundamentally differently. Being able to grow the right kind in a lab will enable research that wasn’t possible before.
Maybe it’s one for automatic processes and another for manual?
Lizard v Monkey brain as the kids say
The parts for dummies like me:
Forebrain and midbrain: the thing you think of when someone says brain
Hindbrain: the brainstem/bottom part going to spine
Weird, I kind of already considered them separate organs…
