“If You Give a Mouse A Human Brain: How Neural Chimeroids Reshape Brain Exceptionalism and Recall Mytho-Kinship”

Unlike other organs, the human brain has remained ontologically isolated—practically sacred as an embodied concept—within the value system of industrialized modern science. While manipulation of brain chemistry has been tested on model species, until recently, we have not dared to cross the biological boundary of merging synapses. However, with the creation of neural chimeroids, that is no longer the case. The human brain—the gold standard of cognition and the biological center of human supremacy—can now be integrated into nonhuman animals, and potentially, one day, vice versa. Neural chimeroids emphasize that we live in a field of evolutionary similarities and differences, reflective of many mythological contexts; they show that on a biological level, our brains are not exceptional. The choice to etymologically merge these intermediary lab subjects with the great chimeras of myth forces us to further interrogate the ontologies underpinning prevailing power dynamics between humans and our nonhuman kin.