Two Brains, One Skull, and the Wrong Place to Start
Phil Whelan opened our chat by telling me I’d floored him. He’d read the piece I sent through and reckoned his brain now had two compartments instead of one. Or two departments, he wasn’t sure which.
I told him that might explain a few things about both of us.
It was a light start, and it went somewhere I didn’t expect. We began with a piece of brain research out of Stanford and ended up wandering through leeches, mustard gas, chemotherapy and the old map we’d talked about the week before. The thread running through all of it is simple and a bit uncomfortable: when you start in the wrong place, it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how clever you are, because you’ll keep failing and you’ll keep blaming the problem for being difficult. The science is worth the trip on its own, but stay with it, because the ripple effects run well past the lab and straight into the way we run our businesses, our teams and our own working lives.
RTHK Radio 3 | Morning Brew with Phil Whelan
Tuesday 29 September 2026 · 16 min 44 sec
Prefer to read it? The full transcript is at the foot of this piece.
Your Brain Is Two Organs
This week on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, Phil Whelan and I talked about a study led by Stanford Medicine and published in Nature Neuroscience on 18 September 2026. The headline is a big one. What we call the brain is two separate organs that grew from two different starting points and ended up packed into the same skull.
For decades the textbook said one early cell in the embryo builds the whole brain. The Stanford team, led by Kyle Loh with Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai, found two.
One of them, carrying a gene called Otx2, grows into the front and middle of the brain. That’s the part doing language and maths and all that long, wandering thinking about where we came from and what happens next.
The other, carrying a gene called Gbx2, grows into the hindbrain, the brain stem sitting at the back of your skull. It looks after the things you never think about: breathing, your heartbeat, sleep, hunger, and the muscles in your face, tongue and throat that let you talk and swallow.
The two never overlap. From the very first days they head down their own tracks, like two railway lines running side by side that never cross.
I joked with Phil that we need to get researchers into a naming class, because Otx2 and Gbx2 don’t exactly roll off the tongue. But the names don’t matter much. What matters is the picture: two systems, two origins, sharing one skull, a bit like two flatmates who’ve lived together so long that everyone assumes they’re family.
The origin work was done in mouse embryos, and the team then grew human hindbrain cells from stem cells in the lab. They also found the same two-part pattern going back around 550 million years, in chickens, zebrafish and acorn worms, tiny creatures on the ocean floor that share a very distant ancestor with us. As I said to Phil, this is research, it isn’t settled, and nobody is walking into a clinic tomorrow with a new treatment because of it.
Decades of Trying to Grow the Wrong Thing
For decades, labs have struggled to grow human hindbrain neurons. It’s been one of those stubborn problems everyone put down to the brain simply being very hard. Complicated organ, complicated job, of course it takes longer.
The Stanford team’s explanation is much plainer. In Rayyan Jokhai’s words, earlier attempts “likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible.”
So people weren’t failing for lack of skill or money or equipment. They were asking one kind of starter cell to turn into something it was never going to become, and then working harder when it didn’t.
On air I put it the way I’d put it to anyone. We always thought we couldn’t grow a brain because it was too complicated and we’d need decades, maybe centuries, of better technology. If this research holds up, we were never going to get there from where we were starting, because we were starting from one cell when there are two. We were barking up the wrong tree.
That’s a very different diagnosis. When the answer is “this is hard”, you throw more effort, more funding and more patience at it. When the answer is “we started in the wrong place”, you go back and ask a different question.
And look what happened as soon as they did. The team grew working human hindbrain motor neurons in a dish for the first time, firing the way the real ones fire, and a problem that had held out for decades moved the moment the assumption underneath it changed.
Why This Matters Outside the Lab
For most of us, day to day, none of this changes a thing. Your brain works exactly the way it did last week. It’s fascinating to know, and that’s about it.
For researchers it opens up a lot, and that’s where the ripple effects start.
Disease. Spinal muscular atrophy and motor neurone disease (known in the US as ALS) both involve hindbrain cells that slowly stop working. People lose the ability to swallow and, in the end, to breathe. Until now it’s been almost impossible to study those cells, because you can’t take brain stem tissue from someone who’s alive. Growing them in a dish means researchers can finally watch what goes wrong.
According to MND Australia’s figures, drawn from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 797 Australians died in 2024 with motor neurone disease as the underlying cause. That’s more than two people every day. A 2025 report commissioned by MND Australia estimated 2,752 Australians are living with it right now.
Regrowing organs. We’ve come a fair way. We’re not bad at kidneys, and we’re having a go at hearts and lungs. Late last year I wrote about a McGill team’s 3D bioprinter repairing vocal cords, which is the kind of thing that sounded like science fiction not long ago. None of it is ready for everyday use yet.
The brain has never been grown, though, and I think this changes the road ahead. If the researchers are right, the job isn’t growing one thing. It’s growing two things, keeping both alive on their own, and then working out how to bring them together. I told Phil I expect that to take decades, maybe a century or more, and I’d rather say that straight than pretend it’s around the corner.
Hunger and sleep. This one surprised Phil. The hindbrain holds the circuits that regulate hunger, and Stanford points out that’s exactly where weight-loss drugs like semaglutide do their work. Phil went straight to obesity, and he was right to. The hindbrain also shapes sleep, which medicine is only now starting to treat as seriously as it deserves. Back in 2013 I told the big bed makers their products would become wellness hubs, and sleep has been shifting from comfort towards health ever since.
Phil also asked about brain stem injuries. That’s a long way off, but knowing where the hindbrain actually comes from tells future surgeons and researchers far more precisely what they’re dealing with.
That’s Ripple Effects in action. The first change is a new diagram in a textbook. The second and third changes turn up in clinics, in drug development, in where research money goes, and in which families get answers sooner.
A Brain in Your Gut, and Other Things We Might Have Wrong
Phil asked the obvious question, and it’s a good one. If something this basic about the brain was wrong, how much else inside us works differently from what we believe?
I mentioned the nervous system in the gut, a dense web of hundreds of millions of nerve cells lining the digestive tract that runs a lot of what happens once food goes down. People often call it the second brain. It isn’t a brain like the one in your head, but it pulls a lot of activity together in one place, which is why the comparison sticks.
My answer to Phil was that I suspect a good deal of what we believe about our bodies will look different in time. That’s not a knock on medicine or science, it’s how they’re meant to work. They build on the best evidence we’ve got today, knowing tomorrow will probably improve on it.
I also said I hope this Stanford finding gets argued about properly. People should try just as hard to prove it wrong as others try to prove it right, because that’s what makes research worth trusting.
A few months back I wrote about three science stories that quietly rewrite what we are, including the finding that mammals didn’t so much lose the ability to regenerate as have the switch turned off. This week’s story belongs in the same family. The surprise isn’t something new turning up out of nowhere. It’s something that was always there, hidden by the way we’d framed the question.
What Will Look Barbaric in Fifty Years
Then Phil and I got onto old medicine.
I mentioned that leeches have found their way back into hospitals. They’re used in reconstructive surgery, where reattached tissue can struggle with blood pooling, and in the United States they’re regulated as a medical device. Some very old ideas still earn their keep.
Phil pointed out the other side. Plenty of medicine from a few hundred years ago would have killed you, from lead and mercury to all sorts of cures we’d shudder at now. He wondered if we’re heading for that kind of shift again.
I think we are, and the example I gave him is one most of us have been close to. Chemotherapy. We give it with absolute love and care to people we’d do anything for, knowing we’re putting something toxic into their bodies.
Almost everyone who’s been near it says there has to be a better way, and they’re right. In some cancers better options are already in use, but for a lot of people it’s still a choice about which harm is the lesser one. I said on air that in twenty or fifty years it’ll be seen as barbaric, and I stand by that, with every bit of respect for the people going through it and the people treating them.
Phil then brought up where chemotherapy came from, and the real story makes the point even better than the half-remembered one. After mustard gas attacks in the First World War, doctors noticed the soldiers who’d been exposed had badly depleted bone marrow and white blood cells. It was an observation, not a treatment.
Decades later researchers followed that thread, and it led to the first chemotherapy drugs in the 1940s. As Phil put it, somebody noticed, and then other people took it on, which is how a lot of progress actually happens.
The Same Shape as Last Week’s Map
Seven days earlier Phil and I had talked about the world map most of us grew up with, the Mercator projection from 1569 that still hangs on classroom walls even though it badly distorts the size of whole continents. (On air this week I said 1596. It’s 1569, and the map’s old enough without me adding decades.) I wrote about it in Still Running on 1569 and before that in The Map in Your Head Is Out of Date.
The brain story has the same shape. We got used to a picture because it was good enough for most of what we needed, and then we stopped checking it.
Left brain for logic, right brain for creativity. One organ, one origin. We only use ten per cent of our brains. Phil raised that last one, and it’s never been proven, partly because nobody can agree what a hundred per cent would even look like, and you can’t measure a slice of something nobody has defined.
None of these pictures were built to mislead anyone. Most came from the best research of their day. The trouble was never that they were wrong once, it’s that we stopped looking at them.
That’s why I love researchers. The good ones don’t accept convention just because it’s convention. They keep digging even when they can’t prove anything yet and there’s no obvious reason to keep going. There’s an itch they have to scratch, and every now and then the scratching turns up something like this.
Where You Might Be Growing the Wrong Cell
Take the Stanford story out of the lab for a minute, because the pattern shows up everywhere.
Capable people, properly funded and working hard, spent decades failing to grow one kind of cell. Everyone put it down to difficulty. The real cause was a starting assumption nobody went back and checked.
You’ve probably got your own version, and so has every team you’ve worked in, and so has every organisation.
On your own, it’s the goal you keep missing and keep trying harder at, when the plan underneath it was built for a life you’re not living any more. In a team, it’s the person who’s struggling in a new role and gets sent on course after course, asked to become something their strengths were never built for. Across a whole organisation, it’s the project that stalls and gets a bigger budget and a longer timeline, when it rests on an assumption about customers that stopped being true years ago.
In every one of those, the effort is real and the people are good. They’re just pouring it into the wrong starting cell.
And the cost isn’t only the thing that failed. It’s the years, and the confidence of people who decide they’re not good enough when the problem was the question they were handed, and all the attention drained away from the thing that would have worked.
So here are three questions worth asking next time a few of you are in a room together:
- Where have we been failing for a long time and calling it hard? When something keeps failing, look at the foundations before you pile more effort on top.
- Which of our beliefs were formed when things were different? The Mercator map made perfect sense for sailors in 1569. It’s using it for different jobs, centuries later, that causes the damage.
- Who’s allowed to scratch the itch? Someone has to be free to question the thing everyone agrees on, without being treated as difficult for asking.
That’s a big part of what Immediate Futures means to me. The future that matters most often isn’t a new gadget on the horizon. It’s the correction that’s already arriving and showing us we’ve been standing in the wrong spot.
How I Came Across It
Phil finished by asking where I find stories like this. He reckoned it was one of the biggest I’d brought him in a long while.
I read in strange places: medical journals, The Lancet, New Scientist, and in this case straight from the Stanford Medicine News Center. The most useful signals rarely arrive labelled as useful. This one arrived as a finding about cells in a mouse embryo, and it turned out to be about how all of us think.
The Picture in Your Head
The brain’s been quietly getting on with the job for half a billion years without checking what we believed about it. Two systems, packed together so neatly we called them one, keeping us breathing and wondering at the same time.
What I took away from the chat wasn’t a fact about neurons. It was a question to carry around for a while: which picture in your head is older than the thing it describes, and where have you been working hard, for a long time, from the wrong place to start?
You don’t need to question everything. Coffee is coffee. But the beliefs your big decisions rest on deserve a second look every so often, especially the ones that have been quietly failing for years.
Choose Forward.
Questions People Ask About This
Is the human brain really two organs?
According to Stanford Medicine research published in Nature Neuroscience on 18 September 2026, what we call the brain grows from two separate starting cells. One (marked by the gene Otx2) becomes the forebrain and midbrain, the other (marked by Gbx2) becomes the hindbrain or brain stem. The origin work was done in mouse embryos, and it isn’t yet settled science.
What does the hindbrain do?
It runs the automatic things that keep you alive: breathing, heartbeat, sleep and hunger. It also controls the muscles of the face, tongue and throat that we use to speak and swallow.
Why does this matter for motor neurone disease?
Motor neurone disease (ALS) and spinal muscular atrophy damage hindbrain cells. Researchers could never study those cells in a living person, and until now couldn’t grow them properly in a lab. The Stanford team has now grown working human hindbrain motor neurons from stem cells, which gives researchers a way to watch the damage happen. In Australia, 797 people died with MND as the underlying cause in 2024.
Does this mean we’ll be able to grow a brain?
Not soon. If the research holds, growing a brain would mean growing two separate kinds of tissue and then joining them. My own view is that’s decades away, possibly a century or more.
Is it true we only use ten per cent of our brains?
No. It’s never been shown, and nobody can agree on what a hundred per cent would even be.
This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 29 September 2026.
Sources: Stanford Medicine News Center, “Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds” (18 September 2026); Dundes, Jokhai, Loh et al., Nature Neuroscience (18 September 2026); MND Australia, MND research statistics, drawing on the AIHW National Mortality Database (accessed 30 September 2026).
▾ Read the full transcript of the segmentRTHK Radio 3 · The Brew with Phil Whelan · 29 September 2026 · 16 min 44 sec · click to open
Machine transcription, lightly unedited. Phil introduces me as “Morris Miselowski”. A few things I said on air are corrected in the article above: the map dates from 1569, not 1596.
On Radio 3, 14 minutes past 12, let’s whizz over to… St Kilda. Nearly forgot where you live, Morris. How are you? Happy Tuesday. I know where I live. It’s okay. Well, you flawed me this morning. For now anyway. Maybe not for much longer. But now I still do. Well, you flawed me because I think my brain has two compartments now instead of one. Or two departments. Yeah, maybe it explains something for both you and I. It’s an interesting piece of research. Again, I love this kind of stuff, as you listeners know. I love it because we have spent forever getting to know the human body. We kind of mapped it through DNA over about 20 years ago. So we’ve got a fairly good subway map of how the body actually builds itself through the DNA. And we can do really good interesting things about the genealogy. We can do really good medicine because we understand at the molecular level. But the brain has always been a mystery. We’ve never really been able to understand it. We know it’s there. And you and I have thoughts inside of it. But we couldn’t really prove it. We know that it’s an incredible piece of… We think we have thoughts, don’t we? Well, yeah, maybe, maybe. But we know it’s an incredible piece of engineering by whomever, whomever, whatever put it there for us. And it drives, we think it drives the human body. What we have always thought, me anyway, maybe it was just me. But what I’ve always brought up to be believed was that the brain was one thing. It had lots of compartments inside of it. And we knew not because we took ours apart, but because we saw wonderful pictures of it. We knew there were two hemispheres. We knew that we thought we knew that different hemispheres, different parts inside the different hemispheres, different things for a long time. The long time we talked about left and right brain and how they’re very different. One was logical, the left was logical and the right was more about creative and arts and things. And we thought that explained something about why some people lean more towards one than the other being a dominance of the brain. But all of that was really based on good research but not a really deep understanding of the structure as we now understand it. And now we’ve turned our attention, we as if I have, but now researchers over the last two decades have turned their attention to really trying to understand the brain at its most molecular level with the equivalency of DNA. So that we really do understand it with the purpose of course of reverse engineering like we have with medicine now that we know DNA we’re able to make specialist medicines and do all kinds of things we couldn’t have done before. That’s the holy grail for the brain understanding. So with all of that coming out, there’s a whole lot of research that I’ve been reading about for the last five years or so and it’s like a freight train at the moment turning into an express train. There’s been a lot of it around and now a lot of it’s being taken up and because research has taken on you guys with AI, with all the people collaborating, it’s become an express train and out of that comes this piece of research from Stanford. Stanford Medicine and this is research, that’s what it is, this isn’t proven, it doesn’t have any outcomes yet but the Stanford researchers over a number of years, in fact a couple of decades, have believed that the human brain is actually not one element. It is two. Two. Even though we think that they look as if they’re fused and one piece, I’m talking about in whole, not left to right, because most of us can picture, you know, that there’s a part down the middle. But what they’re actually saying is that they’re two separate things. They really have no connection to each other, except that they’re connected to each other. And one of the researchers says that it took about 500 million years for these things to be fused together, these two parts of the brain, to be fused together into our understanding now that they’re one and the same. But they have very, very different things. So what these researchers are telling us about the brain is that one, which is called OTX2, the one thing you and I have to do is we have to get researchers into a thesaurus or into a language class, because all these things that they call things are just extraordinary. But they say that the gene OTX2 is what grows the forebrain and the midbrain. That’s the part that we believe does language maths and all the heavy wandering, the exploring, the thinking, all comes out of that. And that’s one separate cell. So when we are formed, one cell starts that journey. And then GBX2, which is another cell, becomes the hindbrain. It’s the brain that basically controls the brainstem. It runs our breathing, our heartbeat, our sleep, our hunger, our muscle, our tongues, our throat, all the things that we don’t pay much attention. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of like the workhorse. All the stuff that you and I take for granted, thankfully, most people do because it just works. That’s GBX2. So two different brains, two different functions, two different elements that just happen to share a flat is how one of the other research describes it, which I love it. They’re flatmates is how they describe it. They’ve been flatmates for half a billion years. Now, why that’s important is because first, understanding is important to know because if it’s true and has yet to be proven, if it’s true, that in research has now have a whole new landscape on which to understand the brain and to do things. But what they also say, and this is many decades down the track, but we have begun as a species to try and regrow organs. We’re not bad at kidneys. We can have a bit of a go at the heart. We can have a bit of a go at lungs. These things are not perfect, but we’re in stem cells in research, in Petri labs, we can grow these things, not to full fruition, not for full use yet, which means we’re still away off the start of the journey. The brain has never been able to be replicated. Never in any Petri dish, in any cell, in any singular cell, we haven’t been able to crack it. And we’ve always thought because it’s too complicated, because it’s too difficult, it will take us many decades, perhaps centuries, until we have the technology. What these researchers say is, if we take this research and it’s true, it’ll never grow from our… So, we’re all from an old belief because we think we’re growing it from one cell into what it currently is and that can’t be possible because it in fact is two different cells. So far so good. If they’re right, and this is a big if, if they’re right, research will come up with the notion that we now have to grow two cells and we have to teach those two cells to fuse together and then over the decades, most probably a century or more, will be in a position where we can begin to regrow a brain. So that’s why that research is fascinating. It’s really the beginning. You know, people always say, oh, humans only ever use a small percentage of their brain. That kind of, that kind of buys into that, doesn’t it? It does. Although that’s never been proven. I mean, I say it’s just as much as anyone else, but it’s, it’s actually never been statistically proven because no one can figure out what 100% is. Yeah, true. So you can’t really talk about a percentage of something when nobody agrees on what 100% is, but you’re right. We, we grow a fraction. We, sorry, we use a fraction of our brain supposedly, supposedly. But fascinating stuff that we’re really at the small, we’re beyond the molecular beat of this and trying to understand the human brain. And on that story, just to round that up, it’s not just humans that have that. They have found the chickens, which has been known for quite a while. Chickens, zebrafish, acorn worms, not something I know about, which live on the ocean floor. So there are a myriad of animals around that have this dual… Brain function that have grown from two separate cells. So we have a head start. We knew it existed in some animals. Didn’t think it was part of the human evolution. Now we’re knocking on the door to thinking well, maybe it is. Well, we got to chuck in the futurism element here, but boy, oh boy, haven’t we had some already? I’m assuming that’s going to take people down the avenue of regenerative medicine cells and stuff. And that’s the belief. That’s the holy grail of this. As always, what we’re trying to do now is now that we understand how the human body works, we understand how we might be able to put organs back, repair them, rejuvenate them. Those things may be possible and in some cases are already. The next big step is growing them. We know we will be able to. We just also know that we’re not quite there yet. Just starting that journey. But this, as the researchers said, tells us that we were barking up the wrong tree. How do we continue it if they’re right? We would never have grown it. Now that we know it’s two separate cells that have to be grown, it’s more likely that eventually somebody will understand how to do it. This isn’t just a bit of a variation. This is huge, isn’t it? It is. It’s fundamentally different from what we believe the human brain to be. It’s like finding another continent, another country or anything else. Something that’s always been in front of us, but we just didn’t know. If they’re right, it will change many things about how we understand the brain works, but also how it functions in the body. There’s been research also over the last couple of years, and it’s not a brain in the way we understand it inside of our head, but They believe there’s actually another brain or a form of a brain inside of our stomach. And that regulates most of what gets down there and then begins to do what it needs to do. So it begins to feed the blood cells, it begins to take waste out of the body. It does all of those things. And there’s a lot of really good evidence that says that’s true. It’s a different kind of brain, but it’s nevertheless a brain because it centralizes all the activities into one place. So for all we know, there could be lots of different types of brains that we have on board that we don’t know. I mean, this is crazy. It’s sort of, you know, we’re basing everything on conventional science and wisdom, etc, etc. I wonder how many other stuff inside us is just completely, possibly totally different? I think much of it is and that’s really what medicine and science does really well. It builds on the knowledge and belief that we have today, which is with the best of intent and the best of evidence and the best that we know right for today. But it most probably isn’t tomorrow. And we know that if you look at medicine going backwards, we would not treat most things the way we would have treated them 10, 15, 50 years ago or 100 years ago because we now know better about how to do it. Strange thing about that I love whenever I tell that story is I say that leeches have actually become a big feature in lots of hospitals to rid people of toxins in bloods. Some things that are old still work. Well, that’s exactly what I was thinking about, you know, the sort of conventional medicine hundreds of years ago people just laugh at it now and it was it would possibly have killed you use of lead and mercury and all sorts of groovy stuff. I wonder if we’re about to embark on that kind of difference. Oh I’m sure we are. You know the one thing that we do with absolute love and kindness is unfortunately people have cancer and they have to have chemotherapy. Nothing good to be said about that. But we know by what we’re doing with it that we are pumping toxins and poisons into the body. That’s a very good thing you bring up there Morris. I mean we all know people friends acquaintances family who’ve gone through this and it just seems so destructive. There has to be. Exactly. And everybody but everybody says the same thing because everybody’s right. We just don’t know what the other thing is yet. There are actually some really good understandings of what it might be and in some cancers, some treatments, because it’s used in more than just cancer, there are alternate treatments already, but we know it’s causing great harm. It really is which of the harms is better and we decide that we would rather live longer with some kind of an ailment caused by it or sometimes if there is no long-term effect of it, then not do it. So to me that’s the perfect example. I’m absolutely sure 20 years, 50 years from now especially, it’ll be seen as barbaric. I mean, well it is, isn’t it? I mean, conventionally accepted that, okay, conventionally accepted that during the First World War, guys who got gassed tended to go into remission because of the, it attacked the fast-growing cells, the mustard gas. Yeah, and it’s really wild. But we didn’t know why or how it was anecdotal. It wasn’t research in the way it was today, but there was a strong belief that you’re right, that that was a form of cure or some kind of a form of treatment. Well, I mean, it was noticed. That’s probably a better way to say it. But then taken on by other people, which is one of these kinds of things that sounds sci-fi. It sounds sci-fi to say that somebody’s found, in fact, our brain is actually two different organs fused together because we’ve never thought about it that way, which kind of leads us backwards to last week’s story. And we talked about the map that we’ve been using since 1596, the map of the world, where we thought that that was the way the world was and the way it looked and the way everything about it was perfect because we were also accustomed to it. This is also another one where we’ve normalised and accustomised this thing about what the brain is. And that’s why I love researchers. I mean, I do love them and I work with a lot of them because they don’t accept convention. They look beyond it, even if they can’t prove it, even if they don’t know why, even if there’s very little obvious reason for why they should be exploring something. There’s an itch they have to scratch and this is the kind of thing that can come out of it sometimes. Let’s just briefly look at a couple of the things that might sort of be offshoots of this. So you talked about the hindbrain. So that contains sort of hunger circuits. Yes. So we’re going to go down the obesity avenue, I guess. Absolutely. And it also controls our sleep. And that’s so important for the body. We’re just beginning to understand how much sleep does for our body. It’s fine, or better. And the one thing we haven’t really mentioned is of course the brains. I’m sure it’s miles away, but we’re talking about perhaps repairing brain stem injuries maybe. Yes. A long way off. Yes, but again what that might mean is that the research actually understands now where that brain, you know, where that surgery needs to happen. Because if they’re right, the mechanical side of the body is that GBX2 that we talked about, which is the hindbrain, it’s the bit in the back. So who knows what they’ll take of this. I’m sure that there will be lots of argument about this being true. In fact, I hope there is, because that’s the rigor of research, that people will try just as hard to prove this isn’t true as they will it is. And other people will pick up the mantle and run with it and see whether there’s anything in it. Fascinating stuff, but they go to some lengths in this article to say basically this doesn’t prove that the brain should be treated as two organs in the clinic today. No. So we’re right back to square one. Well we are except what they are, one and the same for most people. Research viewpoint from a medical viewpoint. It’s the more molecular we go, the more able we are to understand at the smallest level what’s happening, the more likely we are to make change to it. So you and I for our daily lives for most people it’s not even a thought we need to have or to worry about. It’s interesting to know but for a researcher it gives them a new avenue of possibility. And this sort of real sort of empiric research angle would be perhaps growing hindbrain neurons and then seeing if they live or die basically. Yes and I assume that somewhere down the track that’s exactly what will happen now. Now that they understand that’s a possibility because if they can grow two separate cells which is where this starts at the molecular level, if they can grow two separate cells and both of them survive independently because they’re not trying to build a brain, just prove a thesis and then eventually find a way to meld the two together, that’s a really exciting avenue for research and for brain understanding. You’ve been listening to Morris Miselowski, so how did you come across this really briefly? How did you come across this one? Because this looks like one of the biggest ones you’ve dropped on us for quite a long time. Because I read really really strange places and strange things. This comes out of Lancet, it comes out of medical journals, don’t ask why. New Scientist is not a bad place to understand these either. This one came straight out of Stanford Medicine News Centre. Again do not ask why I read that for you by now, it’s just quirky. Fascinating stuff, most brilliant. I’ll catch you next week if we’re both still around. Take care for now. See you later. That’s Morris Miselowski live from Melbourne. Jared Watt’s going to be joining you in 10 or so with his news and some great tracks.
