Episode 511 - How the earliest brains developed and handle touch

Peering into the history of brains with some amazing tiny fossils. How did the earliest brains develop? Is a head just an extension of a segmented body or something else entirely? How did the first brains and nervous systems evolve in arthropods. How does your body process the sense of touch? The faintest sensations of touch are handled by specialist cells in your spinal cord. How do your  brain stem and spinal cord help your body process the senses?

1. Nicholas J. Strausfeld, Xianguang Hou, Marcel E. Sayre, Frank Hirth. The lower Cambrian lobopodian Cardiodictyon resolves the origin of euarthropod brains. Science, 2022; 378 (6622): 905 DOI: 10.1126/science.abn6264
2. Turecek, J., Lehnert, B.P. & Ginty, D.D. The encoding of touch by somatotopically aligned dorsal column subdivisions. Nature, 2022 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05470-x
3. Anda M. Chirila, Genelle Rankin, Shih-Yi Tseng, Alan J. Emanuel, Carmine L. Chavez-Martinez, Dawei Zhang, Christopher D. Harvey, David D. Ginty. Mechanoreceptor signal convergence and transformation in the dorsal horn flexibly shape a diversity of outputs to the brain. Cell, 2022; 185 (24): 4541 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.10.012