Title:
Evolution: Lab-grown 'Mini Brains' suggest one mutation might have rewired the human mind
Authors:
Itzia Ferrer and Per Brattås
Published:
SingularityHub, 7 March 2021
From the article:
It has long been unclear which evolutionary changes have been the most important. A team of scientists led by Alysson Muotri at the University of California, San Diego, recently published a study in Science that shed some light on this question.
They did this by growing mini brains—which are known scientifically as “organoids”—from stem cells derived from skin. Brain organoids aren’t conscious in the way we are—they are very simple and do not reach sizes larger than around five or six millimeters, due to a lack of blood supply. But they can emit brainwaves and grow relatively complex neural networks that respond to light.