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The evolution of the brain refers to the progressive development and complexity of neural structures over millions of years, resulting in the diverse range of brain sizes and functions observed across different species today, particularly in vertebrates. The evolution of the brain has exhibited diverging adaptations within taxonomic classes ...
The evolution of nervous systems dates back to the first development of nervous systems in animals (or metazoans). Neurons developed as specialized electrical signaling cells in multicellular animals, adapting the mechanism of action potentials present in motile single-celled and colonial eukaryotes. Primitive systems, like those found in ...
History of neuroscience. From the ancient Egyptian mummifications to 18th-century scientific research on "globules" and neurons, there is evidence of neuroscience practice throughout the early periods of history. The early civilizations lacked adequate means to obtain knowledge about the human brain. Their assumptions about the inner workings ...
The evolution of human intelligence is closely tied to the evolution of the human brain and to the origin of language. The timeline of human evolution spans approximately seven million years, [ 1 ] from the separation of the genus Pan until the emergence of behavioral modernity by 50,000 years ago. The first three million years of this timeline ...
Vaughan found that after 20 or more reversals, associating a reward with a few pictures in one set caused the birds to respond to the other pictures in that set without further reward as if they were thinking "if these pictures in set A bring food, the others in set A must also bring food."
For information specific to the human nervous system, see Development of the nervous system in humans. The development of the nervous system, or neural development (neurodevelopment), refers to the processes that generate, shape, and reshape the nervous system of animals, from the earliest stages of embryonic development to adulthood.
The field of evolutionary neuroscience has been shaped by the development of new techniques that allow for the discovery and examination of parts of the nervous system. In 1873, Camillo Golgi devised the silver nitrate method which allowed for the description of the brain at the cellular level as opposed to simply the gross level. [ 4 ]
Mirror neurons are neurons that fire both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. [126] [127] [128] Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were themselves acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate and other species including birds. The ...