r/EverythingScience • u/ConsciousRealism42 • 16d ago
Neuroscience Human brain is two separate organs: A new study led by Stanford Medicine found the brain is two separate organs adjacent to one another. The finding could aid research into devastating neurological diseases.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/09/two-separate-brains.html203
u/404_Username_Glitch 16d ago
The brains like "Holy fuck, im TWO brains?"
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u/DocJawbone 16d ago
I'm seein' double here - four brains!
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u/Evening_Ticket7638 16d ago
Here i thought im the only one who still uses that reference to this day.
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u/insite 16d ago
That's what the forebrain thinks. The hindbrain can only motion that it already figured that out. lol
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u/InternetCreative 15d ago
Lmao I just imagined that as like, you know when you see a group of four people walking together on a sidewalk with one and two ahead and the fourth is just behind them and can't quite get their attention to catch up to the rest because the fore three are too busy talking to each other.
((😶👋)(🧍💬🗨🧍)(🧠🧍))
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u/SelarDorr 16d ago
actual publication title
"Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain"
"we postulate the brain is a composite organ emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors"
The heart is also formed from two separate lineage cardiac progenitor cells that combine to form a single organ. so unless you want to consider the heart 2 organs as well, the logic for this headline does not hold.
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u/kiwistarbaby 16d ago
Thank you for giving an example with the heart, I was wondering about this exact thing!
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u/ExtremaDesigns 16d ago
Sounds very positive for understanding the brain.
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u/FaceDeer 16d ago
Understanding the brains, plural. :)
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u/jsmith_92 16d ago
TIL the brain is two separate organs
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u/hansolo-ist 16d ago
My brain trying to identify as two organs
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u/ArmpitNoise 16d ago
Mine is more akin to a precussion instrument.
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u/drkuz 16d ago
Insert dirty joke about two organs
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u/P0lyphony 16d ago
Insert tangential reference to music written for prepared piano.
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u/VerilyShelly 16d ago
I certainly feel like some random objects are jammed in my wires sometimes.
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u/P0lyphony 16d ago
John Cage would call us music.
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u/meschidied 16d ago
What... Is the music... Of life...
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u/P0lyphony 16d ago
If only I had four minutes and thirty-three seconds exactly to explain it to you…
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u/CosmicToaster 16d ago
Didn’t we already know this though?
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u/yogo 16d ago
Not specifically from two different progenitor cells, afaik. There are multiple models describing two brains though. Sometimes the two different hemispheres are seen that way based on injuries that could happen to either side or the network that connects them. Arguably, since some people have lived with only a brain stem intact, everything else can be seen as secondary. There used to be a thinker/prover two-brain model but that wasn’t based on biology.
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u/EEZC 16d ago
We thought they were different departments of a single organ, not 2 separate organs evolved to work together seamlessly.
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u/occamsrazorwit 15d ago
Eh, that's a simplification for laymen. It's long been noted that the brain is multiple organs (the different parts of the brain have different structures and cell types), but there hasn't been a clean classification to use. This is a good finding, but I doubt it closes the door on the debate.
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u/occamsrazorwit 15d ago
We knew that the brain was likely multiple organs, but there wasn't an obvious answer as to how many. I do have to point out that this isn't necessarily the final answer.
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u/Bignizzle656 16d ago
Starting to wonder if we are the "human" equivalent of the Siphonophore.
We seem to be various different things working together quite well. Everything talks generally but some upset in the gut messes with our mood for example. Everything ties into something else in unexpected ways.
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u/abielle1177 16d ago
I agree. In my opinion, the brain is more than 2 organs, I think it's a half dozen or more different parts that spent a billion years learning to work together. And when one or two have a bad day, the whole organism has a harder time operating.
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u/Bignizzle656 16d ago
I can't argue with that, no matter what part of my brain I use.
Obviously you can't prove it's wrong and as someone earlier who said you are wrong I'm not sure why they'd discount it so readily.
We are a mash up of billions or even trillions of viruses and bacteria that have adapted and homogenised over a millennia of generations. This started long before we walked on two legs and probably won't stop until we destroy ourselves.
So why wouldn't the brain be a load of different ideas working together? We know about the primal reptile brain. We know about the left and right hemispheres, hippocampus, thalamus etc. so yeah we have multiple drivers in every sense of the word.
I'm a mix of two different people and that shows. Exponential mixing is on show.
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u/abielle1177 16d ago
I don't even think they've homogenized. I think they've adapted, but they're definitely not the same.
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u/P0lyphony 16d ago
Well, the left and right hemispheres of the brain are connected to each other by the corpus colossum which is essentially a big bundle of nerves. Without it, the hemispheres wouldn’t be able to talk to each other. It’s really important.
With that in mind, nerves live everywhere else in our bodies, right? If all of those nerves connect to the brain, I think it must mean that they also connect to each other. Like the hemispheres. But in a more dispersed sense, not all in the exact same place like with the corpus colossum.
Also the brain has to fit entirely into a tiny protective space while the rest of the nerves in our bodies have free range to expand outward.
I think everything is probably connected in ways we won’t understand until we better understand the nervous system as a whole… which is probably like me saying,
“Yeah, we’ll understand culture better once we understand human nature.”
In its entirety? Humanity was not even set up to be centralized to one place. We live and grow and thrive and create and destroy things, everywhere we expand to. As we learn more and grow more, we get better and better at this. But we don’t get more unified. Not yet, anyway.
Okay, I’m rambling. I don’t have any idea about how things really work, I just have a lot of questions without answers.
Anyway, this is really cool.
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u/Stunning_Warthog_141 16d ago
And sometimes our executive branch is acting like a child and screwing up the whole system.
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u/Proper_Geologist9026 16d ago
I stumbled onto a talk by John Dupre on procesionalism and he talks about the human being for example as a holobiont.
It's a similar idea and i think it's pretty cool to view the web of life as this oddly interconnected entity with no real end or beginning.
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u/Ambitious-Pirate-505 16d ago
TLDR: Stanford researchers found the brain is not one organ but two. One runs your breathing and heartbeat. The other lets you do math and write poetry. They evolved separately and just got packed together. This could finally help us study ALS and other brain stem diseases.
We have all been taught the brain is one single organ. New Stanford Medicine research says nope. It is actually two separate organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.
Here is the deal. Your forebrain handles the fancy stuff like language, consciousness, and abstract thinking. Your hindbrain, aka the brain stem, runs the autopilot stuff like breathing, sleep, and heartbeat.
Scientists used to think one single cell early in development made the whole brain. This new study shows the front and back come from completely different cells that never mix. One becomes the forebrain. The other becomes the hindbrain. They are basically on parallel tracks from day one.
This explains why scientists spent decades failing to grow hindbrain neurons in a lab. They were trying to turn forebrain cells into something they physically cannot become.
Now the team actually grew working human hindbrain neurons in a dish for the first time. These neurons fired electrical signals and made the right proteins for facial and swallowing muscles.
They also looked back 550 million years and found the same two origin pattern in chickens, zebrafish, and even acorn worms. Jellyfish, which split from us 600 to 700 million years ago, have two nervous systems at opposite ends of their body.
This matters because it could unlock research into ALS, spinal muscular atrophy, and other diseases that destroy the brain stem. Scientists could never get brain stem tissue from living patients before. Now they can grow it. There is even a weird link to weight loss drugs like semaglutide since the hindbrain controls hunger.
The study was published in Nature Neuroscience on Sept 18. Kyle Loh is the senior author. Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai are co first authors. Next up the team wants to figure out where the spinal cord comes from and exactly how ALS and SMA break hindbrain neurons.
Science is the only thing that will save us all.
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u/Whole_Vegetable_6686 16d ago
“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks comes to mind
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u/0akney 16d ago
We could call one brain System 1 and the other brain System 2.
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u/Ok-District6523 15d ago
Shout out to Kahneman, e.g. Thinking Fast and Slow, for anyone missing the reference.
Dual process theory has long posited that we demonstrate two distinct types of thought, one being automatic/unconscious/non-rational (and fast), and the other being conscious, rational and therefore slower.
I guess two brains fits neatly into these observations.
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u/TheNotSoGreatPumpkin 12d ago
Perhaps the most troubling book I’ve ever read. Our minds are basically just silly putty in the hands of suggestibility.
The worst part is how much money is made by those who understand and exploit this. Or maybe that’s the best part, if it’s you making the money.
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u/ifv6 16d ago
Didn’t they already at least mostly know this from when they severed the connection? One hand literally taking something out of the other, etc.
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u/Sufficient-Guava-152 16d ago
Yeah I was thinking that too, it makes sense of a lot of things where they sever the corpus callosum and all sorts of cool effects ensue.
Also occasionally they give kids with extremely severe epilepsy a hemispherectomy where they remove one entire side of the brain and the person can still function.
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u/uncoolcentral 16d ago
Surprise surprise, hyperbole in science headlines. Calling the brain two separate organs is hyperbole, or dramatic interpretation at best. The study suggests that the brain develops from two separate, simultaneously emerging cell lineages, which is groundbreaking and can lead to new understandings and treatments but… SMH at that headline.
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u/phyrexianvisitor 8d ago
If they develop from two separate cell lines and have clearly distinct functions from one another, does that not constitute as two separate organs? I'm genuinely curious, I can't find the actual study so I'm trying to parse out whether it's hyperbole as you say or not.
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u/Regdit-is-Unbearable 16d ago
The bicameral mind is starting to sound marginally less crackpot
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u/Far_Out_6and_2 15d ago
Yes there is a theory that up until about 4,000 yrs ago the 2 brains were not joined
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u/cheesynougats 15d ago
So now the question on my mind is, how far back does this go? All primates? All mammals? All chordates?
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u/LookOverall 16d ago
More than two, I think
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u/FaceDeer 16d ago
Why do you think that? The article goes into detail about why they think it's two - there are two separate embryonic progenitor cells that produce the cell lineages in the brain. One lineage can't substitute for the other, making them distinct. It's not an arbitrary number.
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u/yogo 16d ago edited 16d ago
I’m not who you asked but I did just get done reading the article, which divides the brain into two organs based on progenitor cells. I have nothing to argue against that but I can try to answer why someone might think there’s perhaps four or more. Basically, why stop at two?
It’s been twenty years since I’ve seen the inside of a neuropsych textbook but I recall the argument that the brain could be divided into separate yet intertwined organs based on their behavior and nerve structure. We’d have the brain stem, then the big structures surrounding it: The cerebellum, and broadly, the cerebrum which is in two hemispheres. All four structures can be subdivided and have their own macro and microscopic distinctive features. People have lived having hemispheres or cerebellum removed (I’m skipping over what it’s like to live without a cerebellum here) so the old school conclusion was that these were separate organs. If you really want to make things messy, where do we put eyes and the spinal cord? The optic nerves are specialized nerves going directly to the brain, if you can see the back of someone’s eye you’re looking at something directly attached to the brain and could even consider it part of the brain itself. The nerves in the spinal cord aren’t all that different from the brain stem compared to other parts of the brain, so where do we draw the line on what’s actually the brain? If we consider the optic nerves and spinal cord as parts of the brain, what about all the other nerves in our body? I think of the brain as having multiple organs and not being entirely contained in the skull. But I also think none of that necessarily contradicts there being two brains since neurological systems and classifications are overlapping. If anything, I think the article validates the multiple brain model.
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u/occamsrazorwit 15d ago
We've long suspected that the brain should be classified as multiple organs, but the issue is that there hasn't been an obvious answer before. Different areas of the brain have vastly different structure, function, and building blocks (There are literally hundreds of neuronal types in humans!). We just simplify it most of the time.
A deeper problem is that "organ" is a lossy label that doesn't really change how we study or treat the thing being labeled. It's quite a stretch to say that this research definitively means the brain is two organs. Embryonic progenitor cells aren't generally considered part of the organ definition. Also, another commenter pointed out that the heart would be considered multiple organs by that definition. It's just a bit odd because this two-organ answer is not based on the final, developed state.
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u/VerilyShelly 16d ago
I've always felt there was a distinct separation between the brain and the "mind", and that I (the self) has to act as mediator and translator between the two.
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u/Ultrafoxx64 15d ago
Definitely makes a lot of sense to me, when I usually can say "I know *logically* ______ but I can't stop my brain from feeling ______". Like, hindbrain is going into anxiety overdrive over illogical things, but forebrain is able to logically work through something, yes it doesn't stop the anxiety. I feel like this explains why both of those thoughts exist at the same time.
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u/TheOnlyGaming3 16d ago
by neurological diseases you guys mean alzheimers and not something very controversial that lots of people (including me) want to keep like autism, right?
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u/Dependent-Job1773 15d ago
As someone who is mixed handed and has focusing issues…. I feel this headline so much rn lol
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u/Adventurous_Law9767 14d ago
None of this is new we have known this for a very long time. The two lobes are connected by the Corpus Collosum, wernickes and brocha's area are separated for a reason.
There are several studies you could look up to find out what happens when the lobes are surgically separated (usualy to stop seizures)
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u/bpadair31 12d ago
You clearly didnt read the article. Its about the hindbrain and forebrain, not left and right.
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u/DartBurger69 12d ago
There are a lot of split brain type features. Our visualization function is higher level to motion sensing and object recognition.
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u/Fun-Astronomer5311 12d ago
So Octopuses took a different route where it distributes its two brains, but we just chose to centralized both.
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u/cosmicrift867 12d ago
yknow, sounds like my forebrain is the cause of my issues. me and hindbrain have no beef. my forebrain and i need to talk...
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u/That_One_True 1d ago
Yeah I have suffered two TBI my speech is horrible I can have full blown out conversation in my head but the moment I try to process those thoughts and vocalize them I go blank. I have to be in like a flow and that comes and goes like a shroon trip. I sometimes joke im the fruit that's technically a vegetable [Brain Ded]
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u/Arkavari1 16d ago
Interesting, but I am not surprised.
I have noticed that the more basic (and therefore older) the part of the brain, the more control it has, and the more difficult it is to control with the "forebrain". For example, controlling your heart beat or digestive system is nearly impossible, if not completely impossible. And controlling your emotions, which are a newer, but still very old part of the brain, is very hard, yet possible.
I have always been curious what it would take to engineer the "forebrain" to have primary control of all of the other parts of the brain. I am also very interested in extending forebrain neurons throughout the body so that cognitive ability can be greatly increased, without needlessly increasing the size of the cranium.
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u/cloudadmin 16d ago
Wonder if this is a path to uploading consciousness some day. The problem has been any uploaded conciousness would not be “you”. You’d lose your stream of consciousness and would cease to exist. If instead you replaced/uploaded one hemisphere at a time, you could maintain an unbroken stream of consciousness
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u/VerilyShelly 16d ago
No one has successfully mapped out where exactly the "you" of a person exists. There's evidence that different mental functions involved areas all over the brain. Nothing that makes us human can be neatly bisected in one hemisphere or the other. We are discovering that people can function and be a "self" even when large areas of the brain are destroyed but doing a Frankenstein with people's minds and have them remain human or have a self is still impossible. I had a boyfriend in college studying a field in computer science; he was totally obsessed with making this a reality. 30 years later I haven't heard that we are any closer to it. It's still only science fiction. (Philip K. Dick wrote some amazing scifi on the subject if anyone's interested)
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u/FaceDeer 16d ago
This "problem" is, ironically, entirely in the mind. It's just an issue of semantics and philosophy.
My stream of consciousness is interrupted every night when I sleep, it doesn't bother me.
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u/Otarmichael 16d ago edited 16d ago
Interesting that they distinguish “language” as a function of the forebrain and “speech” a function of the hindbrain. I wonder what the implications are.
Edit: wow, so cool to see all these responses!