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Across the board, Hauser says, there are signs that animal evolution passed along some capabilities "and then something dramatic happened, a huge leap that enabled humans to break away. Once symbolic representation happened, if the combinatorial capacity was there, things just took off. Precisely how and when this happened, we may never know." (November-December 2008)

A radically new form of neural network based artificial intelligence has been conceived that in contrast to preceding forms of AI, builds itself and then enters into an intellectual bootstrapping process wherein it learns from its own mistakes and successes to create useful ideas and strategies. Not only is this technology capable of autonomously inventing and discovering new products, services, and procedures, as it has for numerous international corporations and government agencies, it has also devised several revolutionary neural network paradigms. For these reasons and more, AI visionaries and futurists, such as Dennis Bushnell, NASA Langley's chief scientist and visionary, have called this technology, known as the "Creativity Machine," AI's best bet at creating human to trans-human level intelligence in machines. This technology, based upon an extremely profound scientific discovery, is produced and delivered exclusively by Imagination Engines, Incorporated as either customer tailored or mass produced products.

Is it to be full understanding or nothing? I should think there would be some value in enough understanding to make useful predictions. His position is that a scientific understanding of man is undesirable, but I thinnk there is something very desirable about useful predictions.

there is growing evidence that animals share functional parallels with human conscious metacognition -- that is, they may share humans' ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind.

Our understanding of disgust and morality is in its infancy, yet technological advances in neurobiology, an increasing willingness to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue, to take religion seriously as a dimension of human nature and experience, and growing knowledge of cultural differences, have created a climate within which a breakthrough in our understanding of morality could soon occur. (Heather Looy :: Global Spiral)

The first step in figuring out how the human mind arose is determining what distinguishes our mental processes from those of other creatures

The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrative review of the area of Neuroscience and its relationship to Behavioral Decision Making. I will start by discussing Prospect theory and the role that neuroscience can play in understanding human behavior under risky situations. I will then discuss the Somatic Marker Hypothesis and its application in decision making. Further, I will highlight some techniques that are used to measure neural responses. Finally, I will end with future avenues of research where Neuroscience techniques can be applied in studying different Marketing phenomena.

Is there wisdom to be found in repugnance? Or is disgust 'the nastiest of all emotions', offering nothing but support to prejudice? Dan Jones looks at the repellant side of human nature.

there's some suggestive evidence that the brain might contemplate other people very differently when that person is a virtual Facebook "page" and not a flesh and blood individual, with a tangible physical presence. Humans, after all, are social primates, blessed and burdened with a set of paleolithic social instincts. We aren't used to thinking about people as computerized abstractions. (The Frontal Cortex)

Envy and schadenfreude (gloating over the other's misfortune) are social emotions widely agreed to be a symptom of the human social tendency to compare one's payoffs with those of others. Given the important social components of envy and gloating, we speculated that oxytocin may have a modulating effect on the intensity of these emotions.

Facial expressions, Charles Darwin argued in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, are a universal window into emotion. But new research challenges that notion, showing that east Asian people struggle to recognise facial expressions that western Caucasians attribute to fear and disgust. By focusing on eyes and brows, Asians miss subtle cues conveyed via the mouth. (13 August 2009 - New Scientist)

From a single fertilised egg of about 0.14 millimetres in diameter, to an adult human being, the neurophysiology of development of the brain and nervous system is nothing short of remarkable. We are born with around 100 billion neurons, and the development of the brain continues long after birth, with dendrites of some neurons in the neocortex continuing to grow well into old age

A novel bioinformatics approach can predict vaccine effectiveness for the influenza season, and indicates that the current vaccines are likely to be effective against H3N2 flu viruses in the U.S. 2017/2018 flu season, according to research published online Nov. 29 in F1000 Research. Slobodan Paessler, D.V.M., Ph.D., from the University of Texas Medical Branch, and Veljko Veljkovic, Ph.D., from Biomed Protection, both in Galveston, Texas, used a bioinformatics platform to predict vaccine effectiveness for the 2017/2018 influenza season in the United States. The hemagglutinin HA1 region of 251 and 113 human H3N2 viruses collected in Australia and the United States from July to September 2017 were analyzed. The informational spectrum method-based phylogenetic analysis of H3N2 viruses was performed to serve as a base for predicting vaccine effectiveness. The researchers found that analyses of Australian viruses generated two clusters; the vaccine virus was placed in the smaller group. As a result, the vaccine was predicted not to be efficient against most Australian H3N2 viruses in the 2017 flu season; low vaccine effectiveness was reported in Australia in the 2017 flu season in accordance with this prediction. The U.S. H3N2 viruses were also grouped into two clusters, but the vaccine virus was placed in the largest cluster encompassing 71 percent of analyzed viruses. Consequently, the vaccine effectiveness is expected not to be suboptimal in the United States.

Fellows 3 (3): 159 -- Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews

"Social scientists are often concerned about the importation of poorly understood concepts from the hard sciences into "softer" fields like anthropology or sociology. In my view, the story of mirror neurons shows that the reverse also happens: scores of brilliant neuroscientists were set to work on entities celebrated and, one might say, partly invented because they allowed neuroscience to relate to social concepts, like imitation, culture, and art. Once it got started, the story was one of mutual seduction. The disenchantment, if it takes place at all, may take years. Will the speculative bubble burst? "