Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Educational neuroscience is a thriving field of research, and there are many excellent and doubtless well-meaning researchers doing rigorous and valuable work in the area. Unfortunately, there are also businesses that want to exploit teachers’ lack of experience and middle-class parental anxieties about school attainment.

People think, learn, behave, and experience the world around them in many different ways. Some of this diversity is due to neurological differences. Neurodiversity refers to those variations in neurocognitive functioning.

As its goal is to take neuroscience out of the lab and into the real world, applied neuroscience draws knowledge from many areas of science, from psychology to molecular biology.

Given the extent of overlap between the conditions, the under-diagnosis of females who instead present with anxiety, depression or eating disorders, and the estimated prevalence of each condition, a reasonable estimate of all neurominorities within the population is around 15–20%, i.e. a significant minority.

Applied neuroscience explores the applications of neuroscience in real-world settings. Where most of the work in other neuroscientific branches is done in an academic setting, applied neuroscience is used by practitioners — professionals who work in clinics, hospitals, labs, schools, and companies — as a way to support their core discipline.