Pity about the dumbed down for dummies, fake marketing from Stanford.
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.
I always come back to this man and it ... no pun intended.. really blows my mind.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...
— James 1:8 (KJV)
The brain is a composit of cells from two lineages that separate very early in development and reflect a deeper spatial and functional separation deep in the history of metazoan (read: animal) evolution.
Tying all this to humans specifically is just confusing. This is something that’s seen in a substantial portion of animals, and as such has nothing to do with “ poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins”. These features of humans evolved hundreds of millions of years after this two lineage composite organization of animal brains evolved.
I wish the article hadn’t gone out of its way in confusing these issues to push the “relevance” of the research. It’s a pretty remarkable finding anyway.
So in order to stack all these effects to maximum effect: plan exercise before meal, plan mean before doing groceries.
> “What they found was striking: … These differences essentially locked each progenitor cell into its respective fate, like travelers on parallel tracks that never cross.”
The dramatic colon, the obligatory closing metaphor, makes me ill.
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.
The findings arn't exactly "new" but the medical science about it is definitely lagging current research.
Does this finding change your life in any meaningful way?
Why do you think it's important?
When an organ is known to be generated from 2 distinct embryonic preforms, which become merged and integrated at a later stage of development, there is a likelihood that in some distant ancestor the integration into a single organ was much less advanced than now and possibly the two parts remained as relatively separated organs even during adulthood.
There are many groups of animals that include both some species that have retained a more primitive condition, where some nervous ganglia have remained separated, while other species have a derived condition, where those nervous ganglia have fused into a single ganglion.
In this case it is not known for sure what happened, because the early evolution of the nervous system, from a sensory structure embedded in the skin to a complex internal system that mediates the communication between sensors and motor or secretory organs, is still poorly understood.
In any case, this research confirms that the differences between forebrain+midbrain (which includes the cerebrum) and hindbrain (which includes the cerebellum) are very important, because they become established very early during the development of the embryo, at a time when the progenitors of many organs are still interchangeable.
While it might not be perfectly accurate it's hardly misleading.
The most important question: are they all conscious?
A similar example: The melanocytes in the skin originate from the neural crest, not the epidermis. As a significant consequence, melanocytes share cell attributes with neurons. One of these attributes is the ability to infiltrate other tissues. Because of that, malignant transformation of melanocytes has vastly different consequences, compared to epithelial cells. If you asked your doctor why squamous cell cancer and melanoma have such different prognoses, describing your skin as effectively "two organs" would be illustrative and easy to understand, without getting into developmental biology.
"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 article did change an understanding about worlds though, it's just the inner one.
I thought the article title was ok, and material was accessible. I didn't have to go look up 15 new words. I don't mind learning new words, just not all the time. I have seen the hype based articles you mentioned in the past.
So the question still remains...
https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain
What do you mean by oversell? And why do you think the general public would be more apt to understand "distinct embryonic progenitor lineages" than "two organs"?
What exactly is the problem here? You think medical researcher are using medial nomenclature wrong?
Honestly write a paper about it then.
I wanted a drawing, but was disappointed.
I think it's also fair to say they are different organs based on the developmental physiology. Many other organs come from distinct embryonic cell lines.
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.
There’s a balance between being informative to the audience and satisfying for pedants.
Well we see why you're not a journalist.
Comments somewhere down below has details.
Also newspaper headlines used to give a quick summary of the story, online articles as you say, clickbait.
But that's stanford.edu, so we must tread lightly.
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.
Wait, you think the article was written by the researchers?
You know, it's also difficult to trust someone's criticisms when they misassign responsibility. Just like anti-vaxxers do.
"Elon Musk's Brain is Two Separate Organs"
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.
Disclaimer: the work presents these as spiritual/meditational reference points, not established neuroanatomical structures.
Textual reconstruction of the “Brain Apertures” diagram used in the Radhasoami/Surat Shabd Yoga tradition. The named “apertures” are spiritual/meditational reference points in this tradition; labels such as temporal lobe, occipital lobe, cerebellum and brain stem are anatomical landmarks shown in the source diagram in the doc below.
Some details here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N9KxIWNF_z9twZurRgkTLljf...
One problem is that there's no good incentive to spend significant time doing good peer review.
We are so used to reading negative things about viruses that it makes a change to find out how they can benefit us too.
*Yes, there's never really a king or duke or whatever. But consider the history of the word regent.
"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."
"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."
I don't hear much overselling or hype in this, I hear an accurate description of the research and a bit of nerding out over it.
...
> 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.
But no, nothing to see here, not worth our time for this overblown article apparently ...
Are you working on research for any of these? If no, then this article is just "empty calories" in your information diet. If yes, I'd assume (hope, even) that you wouldn't be hearing from this through some institutional PR piece.
By that logic, most of HN is "empty calories". Then why are you here?
But that finding is a direct consecutive of the "cerebellum is a different organ" finding from the headline.
I don't necessarily think it's intentional. For those with knowledge in the field I suspect it resonates the appropriate reaction.
For those outside of the field, I think the perception of what being 2 organs means does a lot of leg work in invoking a response which seems exaggerated, but is probably caused by incorrect assumptions of what the title is trying to convey.
I hope that makes some sense, I feel that was a lot of word vomit but I'm struggling to find the right words, it's somewhat meta
Whereas the left and right brain hemispheres do different things that enable our species to be what it now is; which is more similar to what the article calls hind and fore/front brains, which again do different things that we wouldn't be us without. We would still be human if we had only one kidney the way we have only one bladder or one pancreas.
Kidneys are more like say lungs, gonads, breasts, or nostrils in that we have +1 extra; but the benefit created by multiplicity is ~doubling or capacity and resilience to local disease and random injury-- not a profound functionality. (Like is created by the second eye or second leg.) Of these, the second breast is radically more useful than the second kidney, and is probably a special case as it changes how we live so evolved.
Also, as others point out, hemispherotomies and -ectomies and to a lesser extent corpus callosotomies show that neither hemisphere nor their intercommunicative ability are strictly necessary for brain function. Yes, for ideal function, but that can be said of kidneys too.
Do add to this if you can argue against it.
I don't agree. For that you need to distort the definition of what an organ is to comply the requirement for two separate organs with distinct origin, genetic, and biochemical traits, and different function and responsibilities to somehow remain classified as the same organ.
"Human brain was two separate organs"
Then, both attention grabbig and true?
(if I'm reading parent poster correctly)
Agree.
> why are you here?
For the parts that are not empty calories.
TIL, gosh!
There are many many cases where lies are easier to communicate than the truth.
Take tobacco for instance. For the longest time we did not know it was bad for you. It took decades of epidemiological research and statistical techniques to ascertain that it was bad.
The truth was buried in numbers and human knowledge about applied mathematics and statistics. Without centuries of human endeavor to create the concept of science unionized with the rigor of statistics the truth would have remained forever invisible.
The sheer complexity of the truth in this case makes is extremely hard to communicate. We mostly trust that smoking is bad based off of the reputation of the researchers who established that fact. But the truth was never really directly communicated to most of us as it involves diving deep into the data.
You're literally conflating good communication with easy communication.
It was easy to communicate, but we were motivated to not listen.
Yes there were people who said it’s bad but their word was as good as bullshit because until we had the statistics there is literally no way to truly know.
And actually, the fact that the brain is actually two "developmental" systems combined into one seems like big news to me. We might not know its other uses, but probably for cognitive science and even AI research this might be super useful. In AI, maybe two models should be developed and trained in conjunction that talk to each other, each with different functions and roles, because brains work better this way.
And from what I read, evolution did this type of combined evolution somewhat often. The parts of the ear evolved from different "Gill slits" from when we were fish, meaning the ear isn't evolved from one group of cells in the embryo, but from multiple groups of cells that evolved into one organ system, the ear. Yeah, the middle ear evolved from a different "gill slit" from the outer and inner ear.
Sometimes, what the brain does is genuinely a good solution to a given task - one that's good regardless of whether your neural network is of artificial or biological variety. But sometimes, what the brain does is an evolutionary kludge, or a hack that works around one of the "being made of flesh" issues - of which there are a great many.
We have known examples of both - and a few known features that might go either way.
The brain does have some known useful features that we are yet to plunder - usually because we know they're there somewhere but not how they work. We don't know how the brain stabilizes online learning, for example. Or what low k-complexity priors and data augmentation processes does it use to enable its sample efficiency.
But a two-system split? Useless by itself. Splitting a network in two is easy - but if we don't know what that split does, what it buys us, what useful bias does it impart? We're just adding complexity. See: the investigation into HRMs, and how the "hierarchical" part proved to be a lot less meaningful than anticipated.
It was known and discussed in evolutionary-developmental neuroscience, but not much outside that.
I mean, is that not essentially what a Mixture of Experts model is?
"Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain
Abstract When and how different brain regions diversify from one another remains unresolved.
Does a common neural ectoderm progenitor generate the entire brain? Or do multiple neural ectoderm progenitors exist, each restricted to form specific brain regions?
Here our lineage tracing studies of mouse embryos support the latter model. Two parallel brain progenitors emerge simultaneously during gastrulation: anterior neural ectoderm (forebrain/midbrain progenitor) and posterior neural ectoderm (hindbrain progenitor). Differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into anterior or posterior neural ectoderm-like cells revealed these were lineage committed to forebrain/midbrain versus hindbrain fates, respectively. They harbored diverging chromatin landscapes foreshadowing future forebrain/midbrain versus hindbrain identities. We further differentiated human pluripotent stem cells into hindbrain rhombomere 5/6-specific motor neurons, which were hitherto difficult to generate in vitro.
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."
This suggested a sequence of events, causes and effects, that somehow our minds today can be evolved from a singular 'step' within growth. Only our brains seems have this requirement.
So this requirement, in and of itself, is interesting and newsworthy. For whatever purposes, it's 2 separate systems that many living organisms evolve in the same way. It's 2 steps, for some physical reason.
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.
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.
I have no idea if there's a biological origin for any of this, but it definitely fits with my experience of meditation and awareness training.
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
Actually, the upper and lower brains evolved together and most animals have both, including reptiles.
Didn't read it thoroughly, but your [2] reference seems to be saying this too.
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:
Probably why robotics is harder than making a language model.
Very cool. Never thought the brain could have two completely different ancestors
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.
It seems that it's been known for a while that more primitive animals have/had functionally distinct front (sensory) and rear (motor + autonomic) neural systems, with different genes (Otx, Gbx) associated with each. In 2003 it was shown that an extant species, acorn worms, have this front/sensory, rear/motor neural division, assumed to date back to the pre-chordates.
In vertebrates we also see this association of Otx gene expression in the fore/midbrain and Gbx in the hindbrain, but it had been assumed that these "two halves" of the brain had fused long ago... What this new research shows is that this fusion only happens during development of the embryo, which seems to be a fairly common phenomena "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" whereby embryonic development follows the same steps as evolution (e.g. human embryo also has a tail, chicken embryo has teeth).
Of course the front/sensory and rear/motor neural systems aren't totally isolated, since the sensory signals serve to steer the motor programs running in the back, and our brain still follows this primitive division of functionality.
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."
wikipedia being what it is, on par with secondary literature gives an overview of brain and nervous system origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_nervous_sys...
the primary discipline is embryology, and if you view the progression from cellular to somatic, it is quite clear that structure of nervous system, and brain are early events during organogenesis, and are derived from contact and signalling between cellular plates. there is a gradient derived signal, that induces disparate potency of genetic expression. there is however, not , two individual centers of cellular genesis, all neural cells are derived from same cell cell interaction, and induced to take a constrained set of functionalities based on signal amplitudes.
https://embryology.oit.duke.edu/neuro/neuro.html
the original research in question did not discover a two brain merger, thats a tragic misinterpretation that is doing disservice, and is not even the claim of the research.
the discovery is the difference in genetic expression that required a different cultural regime for hindbrain neurons invitro. previously the paradigm was that forebrain, and hindbrain required almost similar culture, and this discovery allows realization of that fact, leading to a cultural regime promoting invitro hindbrain neuroculture.
And after they discovered this I'm assuming another group of researchers did a genetic overview of when this feature would have split off from the evolutionary tree and we see it was over 500m years ago in dual networked organisms.
"Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7
these are not separate organs these are separate "stem cell" populations.
under such a statement as submitted all of our organs that derive from varied populations of expressive constituency, would be amalgams of more than one organ.
the gist is that an organ is localized structure you can point towards, where as a diffused system, such as nervous system , requires a sweep of the hand, as it is distrubuted over the volume of the organism.
the "common function" is the floor of the definition.
what is clear from embryological study is that neural tissue is derived from communication between two embryonic cell plates, and the result is modified based on spatially based inductive signal consequences for gene regulation.
these are not two separately derived organs later fusing to one mass, these are different regions of the same mass having different consequences of inductive signal.
This just goes to show how huge holes we have in even the most basic knowledge about biology.
We can cut'n'splice DNA in various ways, but up until now we didn't even know where do all of our neurons come from.
There are still more unknowns in those basic areas of biology e.g. how bio-currents shape development of organs in both an embryo and a fully developed organism.
It's rather obvious that there are key differences there but we don't have any solid knowledge about this mechanics itself, let alone on how it differs as the organism matures.
This article is about brainstem (aka hindbrain) vs the rest (midbrain + forebrain).
Evolutionally older animal lineages like fish, reptiles, birds all have midbrain + forebrain as well as the brainstem, so reptilian brain != brainstem.
Where there is some truth to our older "reptilian" brain is that the part of the forebrain called the pallium, that exists even in fish (& reptiles), has much expanded/evolved in mammals giving us our cortex and hippocampus, so you could kinda say that we have a reptilian brain + cortex. Note though that mammals didn't evolve from reptiles - they evolved in parallel from a common ancestor, so maybe better to say we have a fish brain + cortex (& hippocampus).
While the cortex is what gives mammals their intelligence, in birds the pallium evolved in a different way to give them theirs.
Fish Brain = brain stem + small cortex (+ other parts of brain)
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(evolved into)
|
V
Sorry, know this is splitting hairs, but just thought it a useful distinction to make.
TL;DW: Doctors treated corpus callosotomy by severing the bundle of nerve fibers that connect hemispheres of the brain. The surgery effectively stopped seizures from spreading. Left hemisphere handles language, speech, and logical interpretation, right hemisphere handles visual, spatial, and literal tasks.
Because human eyes send visual information to opposite sides of the brain, researchers could show images only to the non-speaking right brain. The right brain could see and physically react to the image (like picking up a matching object with the left hand), but the patient couldn't verbally explain what they were seeing because the left brain was literally in the dark. Instead of saying "I don't know," the speaking left brain would instantly and confidently invent a logical—but completely fake—justification for the action.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TYuTid9a6k
Most animal brains have three very different organs in the brain: the cerebrum, cerebellum, and the limbic system (which itself is further divided into numerous differentiated types of tissues)
True title: Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
The HN title misleads people as to the value of the article.
"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.
https://thebrainscientist.com/2018/04/11/you-dont-have-a-liz...
But yeah, evolution is fascinating.
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.
Article says they weren't.
Please name one other organ that arises from two separate progenitor cell types. If this is common, I have never heard of it.
at one point I learned that it would only take a few hundred thousand years to evolve an eye, and time felt much deeper.
What are the Tensors in LLMs modeled after?
The asynchronous nature of BNNs? The brain does that because its neurons are slow and synchronization is unnatural. The predictive Hebbian learning hybrid that the brain uses? Loses to backprop if you have what it takes to implement backprop.
There are a lot of mediocre or unapplicable ideas in the brain for every good one. Figuring out how the brain does the things it does is hard enough - but making use of that is even harder. It's why ANNs and BNNs diverge so much in form even as they converge in function.
Was just implying we don't know all the useful ideas (not just in tech but in medicine, genetics, evolutionary bioligy, mathematics...) that might be developed because we now know that the brain is two separate systems. It's all good though.
The pallium of a fish and mammal are structured differently. A fish's (& bird's) pallium has a clustered (aka "nuclear") organization, while a mammal's has a mostly layered organization which is what is referred to as the cortex.
There is also more to a brain than just brainstem + pallium. In a vertebrate it's brainstem (aka hindbrain) + midbrain + forebrain, with the pallium being part of the forebrain.
Fish Brain = brain stem + pallium + other parts of brain[1]
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(evolved into)
|
V
Good to know:)
[1] Am using "other parts of the brain" to cover any parts of the brain not covered by the brain stem and cortex
A keeper of balance and rhythm, if you want to think of it that way, and anything that is too much of a burden to creativity: a mind is a bunch of ideas (thoughts) collected into a moment in the mind, all the ones needed for controlling things like balance and rhythm are best handled in an autonomously looped fashion (think Cybernetics: control loops that guide an agent).
The article mentions the forebrain controls creativity, reasoning, higher-level thinking. And the hindbrain controls muscles of the throat, tongue, etc: so speech, singing. We all reach for some 'flow' state: perhaps it's this state where the 80% and 20% are more in harmony within the mind. Where what we create with our minds is appreciated, and the outer loop that critiques ourselves lays quiet. 'Flow' is achieved.
Everything becomes an autonomous loop: which is the study of Cybernetics, and (coincidentally?) the birthplace of AI.
If we follow the pattern of simulating biology, I would expect some ratio of compute could be determined 'optimal' for the new Dream-RSI technique recently: https://www.dream-rsi.com/ to eventually move towards '80%' of compute for autonomously controlled systems, and 20% towards 'something else'. The ratio won't be there in the beginning because an AI system has different autonomous needs.
Through testing and iteration, we'll arrive at some ratio as technology matures: my guess is it will match the one we find in our own heads: 80% for autonomous functions, 20% for creativity.
Keep in mind, dreaming and recursive self-improvement as it is now, is a big unknown: nobody knows what ratio is best, but honestly it's less important because we're all looking at 'Quality' of results right now.
But as the technology matures and moves into robotics and more, and more complexity is required to 'do work': I expect 80% to be accurate.
I can certainly imagine AI architectures evolving similar dedicated circuitry to perform common computations. As in us, it might be particularly useful for applications where some form of motor control is required, such as in self-driving and robotics.
It's a bit harder to come up with areas beyond that where it makes sense for general AI. Math and physics spring to mind, but in general the tendency to snap to a certain handling of an input pattern might be way too limiting in terms of creativity; it might become narrow-minded and primitive in those areas. OTOH, again, that might be fantastic for narrow AI applications.
Some of the information we're aware of, some if it were not, and sometimes we want to be unaware, of certain things, when we're aware (bored).
Recently we learned there are 2 separate lines of development: 2 separate progenitor stem cells that lead to a fully developed front and hindbrain.
Cybernetics is about autonomous loops: there is a loop that keeps us alive. The loop iterates, has rhythm, cycles. There is information that has to be 'brought into a moment' to control your body and mind. And we need two systems to keep our stuff held together and give us a sense of self.
Whatever you think of a given moment: the electric order required to operate your body seems to break down to about an 80/20 ratio of processing power, brain material (a dual system in itself, with two halves) if you consider neuron count.
An 80/20 split to properly persist us and provide a 'now' experience that grows over time. We use the same system to imagine and predict.
Also: consider recall speed, and speed of information transmission itself. What is required for the brain to respond to input, or just persist the body? It's not only important to move information quickly, you just move the right information.
When writing? When riding a bike? Singing, sleeping, etc.
For any moment, like the singular moments you mentioned, we wrestle with boredom and recreation. And we balance time, work, etc. because we have basic needs that have to be met first. Your heart beat must be adequate, you need a certain amount of breath, sleep, food, etc.
It would be a lot of mental burden: try manual breathing and going about your day for as long as possible. The ratio of neurons is about 80/20 for some reason, and it must be a good one for us.
There is a lot of looping and control at play however 'aware' we are.
The cerebellum piping, the control, requires a lot of matter/piping, and the ratio is interesting. I'm considering a whole robotic thing: servos, and brains, and all the control that's required to balance input and output to 'do something', the keepalive loop for a robot that thinks and moves like us:
Bringing it back though, there's an outer loop that allows us to persist. For us it's two systems.
Our 'keepalive' loop two systems, 80/20 split.
is an outer control loop for robotics, like you're mentioning. Those pipes and cycles from the start of this message. If the goal is to create something that resembles a living creature that moves and responds to environment, and does work to persist:
I expect to see a repeated pattern again, the 80/20 ratio. 80 percent required for managing autonomous loops, and 20 percent to do 'creative thinking' or something else, simply because of the new 'dreaming RSI' news: new insights into automated improvement, another autonomous loop.
As we add more loops...the ratio might matter, depending on what you want to do. But if it's lifelike robotics, I expect to see the 80/20 split. But obviously we would just iteratively work out the optimal ratio based on economy.
Nobody tells you what to think. It's simply easier not to.