Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
Human brain is two separate organs
For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.
The discovery overturns a prevailing model of brain development. For decades researchers have subscribed to the theory that there is a single progenitor cell early in development that gives rise to the entire brain. This model suggested all parts of the brain shared a common developmental origin.
The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.
The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease).
“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a petri dish and study their functions.”
The findings will be published in Nature Neuroscience Sept. 18. Loh is the senior author. Graduate students Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai are co-first authors of the research.
Two brains
The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain handles higher-level thinking — language, consciousness and abstract reasoning. In contrast, the hindbrain, located at the back of the skull and often called the brain stem, controls essential, automatic functions that keep us alive: breathing, sleeping, and regulating our heartbeat and hunger urges. The hindbrain neurons also control the muscles of the face, tongue and throat, which affect speech and swallowing.
Despite the critical importance of the hindbrain, scientists have struggled for decades to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory. This gap has hampered research into devastating diseases affecting the brain stem, including spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
SMA is a leading genetic cause of death in children under 1 year of age. ALS, which is often diagnosed between the ages of 40 and 70, affects both the forebrain and the hindbrain. In both disorders, certain hindbrain neurons gradually cease to function, and the patient loses the ability to swallow, which can cause pneumonia when food or liquid is inhaled into the lungs; eventually, patients lose the ability to breathe.
The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain.
The researchers learned this from examining developing mouse embryos. They identified two different brain progenitor cells. One, which expresses a gene called Otx2, is destined to become the forebrain and midbrain. The other, which expresses a gene called Gbx2, is committed to forming the hindbrain. They showed that these two cell populations never overlap; they are mutually exclusive from the earliest stages of development.
The team then examined the DNA packaging, or chromatin, in these cells. Chromatin is a way cells determine which genes can be easily accessed and which are bundled away out of reach. What they found was striking: The anterior neural ectoderm (future forebrain and midbrain) and posterior neural ectoderm (future hindbrain) have fundamentally different chromatin configurations. These differences essentially locked each progenitor cell into its respective fate, like travelers on parallel tracks that never cross.
“Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” Jokhai said.
This revelation explained decades of frustration in the field — scientists had been trying to turn one type of progenitor cell into another that it is fundamentally incapable of becoming.
“In stem cell biology, people are always fixated with creating the end cell type, like the neuron,” Jokhai said. “But it’s important to begin at the earliest stages of embryonic development. Our careful attention to that early time point allowed us to find this fundamental split in brain development.”
Growing hindbrain neurons
Armed with this knowledge, the researchers for the first time successfully coaxed human pluripotent stem cells (a kind of cell that can create any cell in the human body) to become functional hindbrain motor neurons in the laboratory. These lab-grown neurons displayed all the hallmarks of authentic hindbrain cells: They exhibited waves of electrical activity called action potentials and made proteins that identify the segments of the hindbrain that control facial and swallowing muscles.
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.”
“I was surprised at our findings because the word ‘brain’ implies a contiguous organ that likely has a singular origin,” Jokhai said. “But even 500 million years ago, there were these separate neural systems, which now almost operate as one, which is very cool.”
The research also has implications for investigating treatments for SMA, ALS and other conditions affecting the brain stem. Until now, studying these diseases has been nearly impossible because scientists cannot obtain brain stem tissue from living patients. The ability to grow these neurons in a dish opens new possibilities for understanding what goes wrong. There’s even an unexpected connection to obesity treatment: The hindbrain contains circuits that regulate hunger — which is precisely how weight-loss drugs like semaglutide work.
The researchers would like to extend their studies to determine the developmental origins of the spinal cord and to learn exactly how SMA and ALS compromise the function of hindbrain neurons.
“Now we have a model to better understand these devastating diseases, and work toward regenerative therapies for them,” Jokhai said. “This is a very exciting new frontier in brain research.”
Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco contributed to the study.
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants DP5OD024558, DP2GM146258, R00GM121852, R01DK115728, R01DE027538, T32GM119995, T32GM007365, T32GM007790 and F31DE031154); the National Science Foundation; the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine; the Spinal Muscular Atrophy Foundation; a Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute grant; the Stanford Beckman and Ludwig Centers; the Siebel Stem Cell Institute; a Stinehart-Reed Foundation grant; the Gatsby Charitable Foundation; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; the Packard Foundation; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the Baxter Foundation; the Human Frontier Science Program; and the anonymous, Fickel, Gilbert, and Stinehart-Reed families.
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About Stanford Medicine
Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu.
Journal
Nature Neuroscience
Article Title
Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain
Article Publication Date
18-Sep-2026
The aging brain is not declining. It’s adapting.
The aging brain is often viewed through a lens of cognitive decline, with older adults seen as compensating for their fading memory. New research in Perspectives on Psychological Science challenges that view. Drawing evidence from molecular biology and neuroimaging, researchers at the University of Arizona argue that late-life cognition is a natural phase of human development, one that prioritizes wisdom over details.
The researchers call this idea the adaptive aging hypothesis. It may explain why older adults are especially well suited to teaching, mentoring, storytelling, and other roles that allow them to share accumulated knowledge and wisdom with younger generations.
“If we look at normative aging as a story of just decline, we are really missing the boat,” said study coauthor Fabian-Xosé Fernandez, an associate professor of cognition and neural systems at the University of Arizona. “The older brain is optimized for different things than the younger brain, predominantly the sharing of stored expertise and social relationships.
The hippocampus helps the brain capture the rich details of an experience, while the frontal cortex focuses more on the overall meaning, or “gist.” During healthy aging, the brain naturally places less emphasis on the hippocampus and relies more heavily on the frontal cortex.
“The fact that you see this across people and animal models suggests there is an evolutionary driving force,” Fernandez said. “One could argue you are developing your entire life, and development occurs in lockstep with the needs of your brain. When you’re younger, the hippocampus turns on because you don’t have a knowledge base or know how the world works. A kid absorbs information like a sponge because they are building an archive of information. In early life, the balance is tilted toward recollecting declarative memories with precision, detail, and context.”
An older adult, by contrast, has a vast store of knowledge to draw upon. Integrating a new experience with that knowledge may be more useful than preserving every detail. The researchers argue that, as people age, the brain shifts its priorities from gathering highly detailed information to understanding the broader meaning and concepts behind an experience.
This shift, which was also observed in animal models, could serve an evolutionary purpose, Fernandez suggested. By helping older adults protect and use what they have learned, it may support judgment, mentoring, and the transfer of knowledge to younger generations.
“Given those goals, it makes sense that you aren’t interested in nitty-gritty details,” Fernandez said. “You are interested in safeguarding the vast knowledge you already have. Evolution may be saying that if you make it long enough, there’s a need to transmit this information, so we put into motion biological changes that enforce and protect your semantic and autobiographical memories.”
This framework may also help researchers distinguish healthy aging from Alzheimer’s disease.
“When I was in grad school, people thought about Alzheimer’s as a more intense version of cognitive aging, but that is just not the case,” Fernandez said. “They are completely different.”
In Alzheimer’s disease, he explained, pathological processes involving proteins such as amyloid and tau may derail the brain’s developmental shift from the hippocampus to the frontal cortex, which usually happens between the fifth and seventh decades of life.
“In normative aging, hippocampal activation is deemphasized, which is probably what should be happening in a 70-year-old. But in many cases of Alzheimer’s, it turns out the hippocampus is hyperactive,” he said. “This beautiful developmental transition is completely disrupted in Alzheimer’s disease by pathological processes that mess with episodic memory and interfere with circuits that allow you to think about your own life, lexicon, and vocabulary.”
For older adults, trying to make an aging brain work like a younger brain by focusing on specific details rather than the bigger picture may be counterproductive, Fernandez said. “For many individuals, the weight of how you process information should probably not be so hippocampal-centric by the sixth or seventh decade.”
Instead, society can embrace the aging brain’s natural strengths and help nurture them. That could include encouraging social connection, particularly intergenerational relationships that allow older adults to share their wisdom.
“People see older individuals and look at them as not being on par with younger individuals across a lot of metrics,” Fernandez says. “The way I look at it is that you’ve got someone with a brain that has been active for several decades and has seen a lot. There is tremendous value there, and we don’t do a good job of unlocking it.”
Reference
Fernandez, F., Burke, S., & Nadel, L. (2026). Aging as a continuation of development: A hypothesis and framework. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Journal
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Article Title
Aging as a Continuation of Development: A Hypothesis and Framework
Article Publication Date
23-Sep-2026
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