Major Link Between Human and Octopus Brains Found, But How Does It Actually Work?

hello wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing the brain once again because I'm essentially continuing my quest in trying to figure out how intelligence evolved in trying to understand how brains evolved and I guess to answer the question of can they actually evolve elsewhere in the universe but this time we're focusing on something right here on planet Earth we're focusing on the difference of the brain between two different organisms well technically our brains or vertebrate brains very complex brains with very complex intelligence and the not so complex brains from various invertebrates like this one you see right here that comes from an organism that's over half a billion years old that was recently discovered in one of the papers we're going to be discussing in this video so earlier this month there was a peeper that essentially talked about the evolution of the brain by studying the creature that was approximately 530 million years old the creature that possibly looked like this although the actual fossil looks like this and in this case the scientists discovered that even back then the the nervous system was already divided into at least three parts but most importantly the brain was already separate and this was even before the head evolved which kind of implied that the evolution of early brain most likely started even before had became an actual organ but brains were still a separate organ inside the body but for some reason eventually all brains settled around the head area although even now it's not entirely clear why maybe because hats were just more protected and brains were extremely important for functioning but that was just the first discovery in terms of the brain Evolution but the main focus of this video is actually this paper and this paper discovers something pretty intriguing it discovers a really important factor that might actually determine if an organism develops a really complex brain and as a result complex intelligence complex intelligence reserved to only certain species on the planet but in order to try to understand what the scientists are trying to solve here and in order to understand the problem of the brain we basically have to go back back in time approximately 600 million years during this period some kind of a warm-like creature started to develop an early nervous system but potentially the first primitive brain that would be located somewhere within his body possibly near the mouth and over time this apparently became really successful this particular animal wouldn't really know what it was started to slowly evolve into other species and specifically they started to evolve into two main categories some of these early creatures evolved a kind of a backbone we refer to this as a vertebra with some of these earlier creatures resembling something like this this is actually a modern Lancelot but the scientists today believe that it resembles an ancestor of all of the invertebrates that evolved afterwards whereas the other worms did not evolve any backbone and remained invertebrates here this actually includes quite a large family including things like mollusks various types of arthropods various types of insects and even things like tardigrades water bears but interestingly within a few million years when it comes to the brain the vertebrates the creatures with the vertebrae the creatures with the spine essentially developed really complex brains that only became more complex with time obviously this is us as well but also a lot of other creatures even creatures like fish that do possess really complex brains you might want to check out one of the previous videos that actually talks about a fish with very complex communication it should be in the description but when it comes to invertebrates they didn't really evolve complex brains at all their brains remained really really simple which actually does create an interesting question why not what happened to these creatures versus these creatures that allowed vertebrates that allowed us to evolve super complex brains but not these guys and this is of course on top of the other facts such as the fact that the brain itself is actually a fluke of evolution so in order to understand if brains and complex intelligence can actually evolve somewhere else out there we have to try to answer these questions we have to try to understand what midbrains of vertebrates like us so special and there is potentially a really interesting answer recently discovered in this paper not all invertebrates remain simple brains at least one type of invertebrates actually did evolve super complex brains after all and based on the title of the video you probably guessed which ones we also have cephalopods octopuses squids cuttlefish a complex invertebrate that evolved complex brains in the dependently in the last 500 million years and the question is of course how or why why octopuses and so many vertebrates but not other invertebrates not for example butterflies not for example ladybugs and that's pretty much the question tackled in this recent paper and obviously it's a pretty tough question to tackle as a matter of fact how would you even Define this complex intelligence what makes us think that octopuses are actually intelligent well there are quite a lot of recent papers on top of that that actually do discover various follow thoughts are ridiculously smart for example you might have heard of the marshmallow test before it's actually a very famous psychological experiment where a few kids were given marshmallows or actually were shown marshmallows and were given a choice either eat one right now or wait just a few minutes actually quite a lot of minutes and will give you something much better it was testing patience but it was also testing the idea of planning a complex brain is able to anticipate and plan and is able to delay immediate gratification education in order to receive something better later on in the actual experiment basically showed us that kids who were able to kind of wait a little bit before they eat the marshmallow would actually then even become extremely successful later in life but more importantly for our topic is that this was also tested with other animals it was tested on various Birds specifically Corvettes such as magpies where they actually did pass the test it was also tested on chimps and they also passed the test and most recently it was tested on cuttlefish one of the more complex cephalopods known to be able to communicate with its partners and actually even humans as a matter of fact I have a personal experience of meeting one of these things and was desperately trying to communicate with me using colors true story but anyway I have no idea what it was saying important fact here is that they definitely passed the test with pretty much all of the Cuttlefish passing the test with flying colors and this of course implies that they also developed complex intelligence and thus complex brains and so something in the family of cephalopods allowed all of them to develop complex brains but not other invertebrates and that something has to be similar to vertebrates that develop these brains as well and though there is no clear answer yet the answer seems to be related to a very specific type of very unique RNA molecules that some creatures possess the molecules that generally resemble something like this now these are not mRNA molecules or messenger RNA and their non-dna molecules at all they're known as micro RNA miniaturized RNA molecules whose true function is still being understood even today and generally speaking all of them seem to be relatively small about 20 to 23 nucleotides in length and seem to perform one single function they're responsible for silencing RNA molecules the molecules that are then responsible for producing various proteins our bodies are made out of but these micro RNA molecules are definitely involved in RNA silencing although it's quite clear that they have a lot of other functions as well because our bodies are actually bodies of all vertebrates contain so many micro RNA molecules in them for example it's believed that there are over 2 000 micro RNA types in human genome alone with the vast majority of them having still unknown functions but what many of them affecting RNA to some extent at the same time a typical invertebrate such as a snail or a worm or even a plant that has these as well will usually contain relatively small number of micro RNA molecules something that at first might only seem like a coincidence until you analyze the brains of cephalophos and that's exactly what the scientists here did even compared to some of the vertebrates such as fish birds or even frogs octopuses have way more micro RNA families and significantly more than every other invertebrate with the recent findings even suggesting that the majority of newly discovered micro RNA families were actually in the neural tissue and mostly in the brain and since here we're talking about thousands of different invertebrate species with these ones been the only ones in the possession of complex brains and a huge number of families of micro RNA the correlation here is a little bit difficult to ignore now obviously this is not a cause and effect Discovery but it still suggests that micro RNA potentially might be the reason why certain animals develop extreme intelligence they likely play in a fundamental role in the development of complex brains but here's the thing we don't ruin exactly know what micro RNA molecules do in our bodies except for of course modifying certain RNA molecules now maybe they're only responsible for RNA editing and maybe it's the amount of editing that somehow leads to complex brains and complex intelligence for all we know maybe it's actually quite the opposite maybe because there are so many micro RNA in the brains of octopuses they actually had to come up with alternative techniques in order to create even more diverse RNA molecules which then resulted in more proteins but the conclusion is still the same higher number of families of micro RNA molecules seems to be directly correlated with the complexity of the brain and the complexity of intelligence something that other invertebrates don't seem to have so definitely a super intriguing Discovery but not really a clear answer to the complexity of the brain and to the complexity of intelligence humans and octopuses definitely have this in common but what exactly does this do what does Micro RNA do to make all of this complexity and so on that note it's a pretty intriguing Discovery but unfortunately leaves us with a bit of a mystery that doesn't provide enough answers so the answer to the similarity between humans complex vertebrates and of course cephalopods seems to be kind of genetic but exactly how those genetic components influence the evolution and the formation of brains is still super unclear it will probably become clear with time for now just another mystery on that note check out some of the previous videos on this topic in the description below and watch out for more videos in the future as well because we're going to be continuing this quest of the discovering intelligence and whether it exists anywhere else thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who has learned about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe support this channel on patreon by joining Channel membership or by buying one of a person t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] [Music] thank you thank you foreign Oh no you're eating your own poop

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 143,331

Keywords: human brain, octopus brain, cephalopod brain, brain, neurons, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, brain vs universe, brain cell vs the universe, brain structure, consciousness, cosmic web, neuronal network, neural net, flow of information, axons, web, brain and universe, neuron discovery, biology, human neurons, memory, engram, memory formation, connectomics, perceptron, arc gene, arc protein, capsid

Id: 8rj1iabVj4o

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2022