A new study shows that the concept of the mammal's lizard brain can be put to rest.
Scientists have shown that mammal and reptile brains are different from one another. The idea of the triune brain is dead.
The idea of the lizard brain was popular in the 1960's and 70's. The parts of the brain of mammals were very similar to the parts of the brain of lizards. He concluded that the brain had evolved in stages after life moved to land.
The reptilian brain was the first model that came to mind. The limbic system included the hippocampus, amygdala, and the hypothalamus. The neocortex came to life in primate.
Under the triune brain model, the different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions, and the more primitive parts of the brain are more concerned with survival.
The model has been denounced by neuroscientists for a long time. The brain doesn't work that way in sections that are separate from one another. The brain is a web of neural networks. New techniques can help us understand how brains evolved.
A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research turned to actual lizard brains to investigate and published their findings in a paper.
The researchers wanted to unpick the evolutionary histories written into the brains of mammals and lizards.
Neurosciences are the most diverse cells in the body. Changes in the developmental processes that produce them may lead to changes in the neural circuits they belong to.
It was a very important time for the evolution of the brain of animals. When the first four-limbed animals emerged from the water onto land, they became part of the parent families that would eventually produce birds and reptiles.
A shared ancestral architecture is found in the subcortical regions of the brain during the early stages of development.
The researchers decided to take a different approach to detail the differences and similarities between reptile and mammal brains.
They used the transcriptomes from the brains of bearded dragons to create a cell-type atlas of their brain. Existing datasets on mouse brains were compared.
Over 280,000 cells from the brain of Pogona were profiled by us.
The integration of our data with mouse data showed that these neurons can be grouped transcriptomically in common families.
The core set of neuron types that both mammals and reptiles have in common have the same transcriptomes.
The neurons aren't limited to a specific area of the brain. The analysis showed that most regions of the brain have a mix of ancestral and newer types of neurons.
The researchers found that the thalamus can be divided into two groups based on their connections to other parts of the brain. The connected regions are different in mammals and lizards.
The team found that the transcriptomes differed in ways that matched the connecting regions, suggesting that the transcriptomic identity of a neuron is a reflection of its connections.
It will take a lot of data to reconstruct the evolution of the brain over the past half billion years because we don't have the brains of ancient animals.
We are living in exciting times because this is happening.
The research has appeared in a journal.
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