Some experts claim that marketing is an analytical discipline: a good marketer must possess robust left-brain capabilities and excel at quantitative reasoning.
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) is a well known bio-inspired model that simulates human brain capabilities such as learning and generalization.
Daniel H. Pink, an author and consultant, says SA should move to higher ground to find new ways to differentiate itself on the basis of right-brain capabilities that will be difficult to offshore.
Others will counter that marketing is too fuzzy a field to be boiled down to a series of mathematical formulas and that to excel at marketing you need right-brain capabilities such as creativity and pattern-detection to unearth unarticulated market customer needs.
The new research suggests some dinosaurs may have already evolved these brain capabilities, even if they never took flight.
I concede that there is often no easy, or sometimes even good, way to treat the problem, as addiction compromises still developing brain capabilities such as insight.
Or, as The Economist argued about electric brain stimulation specifically, they may not pan out; they noted that studies suggest the benefits may be illusory, or at the expense of other brain capabilities.
The Golds argue that suspicion of others is a primitive, lower-brain capability that would run unchecked without the modulating effects of the higher brain's rationality.
In the 20 years since Wolfe wrote about neuroscience it's perhaps most remarkable that questions about the meaning of life have started to take a back seat as the big developments have shifted towards reading, modifying and extending the brain's capabilities: controlling brain cells with fibre optics, connecting robots to neural implants, and using electrodes to alter brain circuits.
Something is profoundly wrong when we can point to 2-year-olds in this country and make a plausible bet about their long-term outcomes — not based on their brains and capabilities, but on their ZIP codes.
