
Newly Discovered 'Rose Hip' Neurons May Be Unique To Humans - snapspans
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/27/642255886/a-new-discovery-may-explain-what-makes-the-human-brain-unique
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hyperion2010
While I am usually sceptical of anything that has even a whiff of human
exceptionalism, this is a fascinating result. Ed is extremely interested in
and well versed in comparative neurobiology, and despite the deathgrip that
Allen's PR team has on all external communication, the fact that he seems to
have approved of the spin is a good sign. Second, the primary outstanding
question that I have is whether we have actually sampled the population in L1
sufficiently in other species. Another (maybe unpublished?) result that has
come out of Ed's group (and collaborators) is that human neurons are extremely
metabolically robust. They are almost like turtle neurons, they can be patched
for extended periods of time and live for days to weeks. When compared to
rodents this means that this cell type might simply be living long enough to
see it, and dying too quickly/being too unhealthy to patch in rodents. The
transcriptomic data suggests that this might not be the case, but the results
from the sequencing of marmoset cell types are not in yet, and good luck
getting this data for a great ape.

~~~
buntress
Once an aspect of human exceptionalism is noted, I would imagine one would
look at chimpanzees as the next analogue, and not mice.

Nearest neighbor, top down, based on genetic similarity. If you’ve got
something, and it seems that it’s only detected in humans, aren’t chimpanzees
(or may other great apes) the gold standard for human comparative biology?

Then follow the chain, back through old world monkeys, before reaching
rodentia.

~~~
nonbel
I had some old pictures of stained rodent brains and saw something looked
qualitatively like what they described in the first (and only) image I
checked. Since they dont give any definite criteria for me to compare against,
what can I do?

~~~
hyperion2010
Well, they give about the most definite criteria they can given current
techniques, which is the transcriptomic profile. In fig 2e [0] they also give
a bouton density profile. If you still have the pictures and have
neurogliaform and basket cells stained with the same technique, you should be
able to determine whether you are in the ballpark.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0205-2/figures/2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0205-2/figures/2)

~~~
nonbel
I looked at the paper. I mean there needs to be a table that tells us what
they consider the acceptable range for spine density, bouton density, soma
size, soma ellipsity or whatever shape stats, branching stats, etc.

I dont really know what to do with that figure 2e... it looks like they cherry
picked stats where they saw a "significant difference" from the other types of
cells they looked at.

------
Someone
_”It is still possible that these newly identified neurons will also be found
the brains of primates like monkeys or chimps, Lein says.”_

Possible and, in my universe, quite a bit more likely than that these cells
are _“unique to humans”_ (cursorily reading the paper, these scientists didn’t
even look for this type of cell in anything but humans, but only claim that,
if rodents had them, they would have been found there, given the amount of
time spent looking at rodent brains)

Disclaimer: I’m not a neuroscientist (but that’s an advantage, too. I don’t
have to keep hunting for funding. That removes incentives to sensationalize
results)

~~~
hyperpallium
By that logic, if humans had them, they would have been found before now,
given the amount of time spent looking at human brains.

It seems you have to be looking in the right place, in the right way, for the
right thing.

But it's wrong to knock a new discovery - even if not unique to humans, it's
still a discovery. Let's celebrate the feature for itself, not benefits that
might follow.

~~~
stult
There's probably been orders of magnitude more time spent analyzing rodent
brains, simply because there is an effectively unlimited quantity available
and an extremely limited quantity of human brains available. Essentially all
invasive human brain studies are preceded by animal model studies (usually
starting with rodents before proceeding to "higher" animals if that's called
for), but conversely not all animal model studies result in a human follow up.
Meaning a hell of a lot more rodent brains get put under the microscope. So in
general you would expect to find them in rodents first, if the probability of
serendipitous discovery is purely a function of time spent conducting
unrelated analyses.

~~~
snapspans
Uniqueness as an artifact caused by limits on current knowledge is a salient
point. To give an idea of the state of the art in the understanding of living
brains, this page presents a pie chart of known neuron types by species:

[http://neuromorpho.org/byspecies.jsp](http://neuromorpho.org/byspecies.jsp)

~~~
igravious
If an alien stumbled across that data they might surmise that rodents "rule"
this planet, followed by fruit flies as their symbiotes/slaves/pets, followed
by everyone else.

However, if they had a moral code like ours they might instead surmise that
rats, mice, and flies are viewed as expendable to the actual "rulers" of the
planet and that these have an aversion to slicing themselves up for science.
So they might conclude the rulers to be one of the primates given the
existence of three close species: human/chimp/baboon in one family (monkey).

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ilaksh
I read the article, and it seems like it could be an important difference for
some types of biology research, if they actually verify it isn't found in
other species that they haven't checked yet.

But my initial reaction to the headline was about AI research. My personal
belief is that if you are looking at biology for help creating more powerful
general purpose AI (AGI or "strong AI"), the idea that humans are special is
actually mostly wrong and is counter-productive. For example there were many
earlier efforts that emphasized reproducing the more rational aspects of human
cognition (things animals seemed unable to do), but those turned out to be
dead ends for AGI. Computers can do automated mathematical problem solving or
proofs or play chess much better than humans, but it turns out that much of
what people do doesn't have cut-and-dried rules that we can just enter in.

Most, if not all of the capabilities that have been more difficult to achieve
in AI are shared between humans and animals. If anyone has had a pet they
might have noticed some abilities that may or may not have seemed particularly
smart at that time. But when you start to look at it from the perspective of
reproducing those abilities in robots, no one has come close. And those
capabilities are shared with humans and can be mapped to higher-level
abilities.

For example, start with the advanced vision and motor systems that work
together in the average house cat. Add in the ability to communicate and
coerce humans into providing fresh food and water at will (ok, my cat was
spoiled). The desire and ability of the cat to play in a slightly creative way
-- my cat would look at me, arch her back, puff up her tail, tilt her head, as
a clear communication that she wanted me to play chase with her. Then she
would run and find a new place to hide. Or she would run up and smack me with
both paws on the ankle at the same time, check that I had noticed and then run
away -- another invitation to play. (Coincidentally, tag was also by far my
nephew's favorite game when he was little.)

I guess I don't really have the motivation today to make a really in-depth and
convincing argument here. But at least consider making artificial cats before
you make artificial humans. Even if you don't agree that it is a big step
towards reproducing human abilities. Because cats _can_ be pretty great, but
litter boxes are disgusting.

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jtbayly
But we’re totally going to be able to simulate the human brain and upload
consciousness into a computer, right?

~~~
bitL
What if singularity already happened and we are its result?

~~~
newsbinator
Then we could probably make it happen again, for us.

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vinceguidry
I'm quite curious as to what provides for the kinds of mental 'structures'
that make for so much of our inner lives.

This is an old blog post, and seems to have lost the formatting, but this is
the concept I'm pointing to:

[https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/07/31/pillar-
management...](https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/07/31/pillar-management/)

The conclusions we come to, wind up constraining the thought space of our
future thoughts. I believe this _cognitive_ process demands explanation.

------
ComputerGuru
I feel discoveries like this that can either be a promising lead that turns
out to be nothing (e.g. mice don’t have these neurons but other animals do) or
could wind up being the single biggest discovery in the study of sentience
ever are the perfect example of what real science is like.

~~~
newsbinator
When has it ever been the latter?

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Penicillin was pretty big. Amusing discovery too. As penicillin is
fundamentally a derivative of the blue-green mold that can appear on decaying
matter, the idea of injecting it into yourself to combat bacterial infections
is something that few would believe. It only began to be regularly used some
14 years after its discovery, even the discover rapidly shared and published
his findings.

On the other hand, maybe these discoveries are a bit different. It seems the
big discoveries often come in the form of falsifying previously held beliefs
rather than immediately introducing novel 'actionable' discoveries. For
instance Mercury's orbit goes off by a pesky 0.01 degree change _per century_
that could not be accounted for by Newtonian planetary mechanics. That
falsification is perhaps at least part of the long chain of events that would
culminate in the discovery of relativity.

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Camillo
> A scientist named Gábor Tamás and members of his lab were studying brain
> cells called inhibitory neurons, which act like the brakes in a car. They
> tell other brain cells when to slow down.

Is this "explain it like I'm five" passage really necessary? Surely any adult
would understand what an inhibitory neuron does from the name alone. Would a
writer feel the need to explain the meaning of the word inhibit? Inhibition?
Uninhibited? And if they did, would they do so in such childish terms?

~~~
MichaelBurge
Does an inhibitory neuron prevent other neurons from firing, negate the effect
of their firing, or slow them down?

~~~
nonbel
It can do any of those or the opposite. The effect of the signals from one
neuron depend on the properties of the receiving neuron.

Ie, the same neurotransmitter released can be "excitatory" to neighboring
neurons in one case and "inhibitory" in the next:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645221...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452214006411)

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phkahler
"These types of cells [inhibitory neurons] are extremely important," he says.
And when there's dysfunction in them, he says, that can "directly be linked to
different types of neuropsychiatric disease, like schizophrenia."

That's a really bold claim with nothing in the article backing it up. If I put
my thinking cap on, perhaps there is an established link between failure of
inhibitory neurons and neuropsychiatric disease (this would not surprise me
but it's not called out in the article), but even if that has been established
it's a big leap to assign so much importance to this particular variant of
inhibitory neuron that has just been discovered (in dead people) and is barely
understood.

~~~
bognition
The claim isn't that bold, there is a well established link between inhibitory
neuron disfunction and neuropsychiatric disorders.

I think you're mis-reading the comment. The passage says that inhibitory
neurons are important, not the 'Rose Hip' neurons.

~~~
phkahler
You are correct. I interpreted that as saying these particular cells are
important, not the general class of inhibitory neurons. The article also
didn't (unless I missed it) spell out the connection between inhibitory
activity and neuropsychiatric disorders.

I had not heard of the relation between lack of inhibitory action and such
disorders, but I know glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter and its
deficiency can play a role in such disorders. Now I know of a more general
framework to put that into. So this all make sense now, but it wasn't clear to
me strictly from the article. Thanks.

