What can a 535-million-year-old fossilized brain tell us about the origins of our own nervous system? Nick Strausfeld reveals how ancient arthropod fossils are rewriting the evolutionary history of the brain.

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Nick Strausfeld makes a compelling case for why neuroscience must be grounded in evolutionary and comparative biology. He argues against the over-reliance on a handful of model organisms, insisting that understanding the brain's design principles requires studying nervous systems across a wide range of species. The conversation traces the deep architectural features shared by insect and crustacean brains, revealing a common organizational template built around glomerular processing units that can serve olfactory, visual, or tactile modalities with fundamentall ...