An introduction to applied neuroscience

Recent years have seen a huge growth in the public awareness of neuroscience. People have become more interested in new findings about the brain, and also find brain-based explanations quite compelling. This public interest has led enterprising individuals to try to apply neuroscientific ideas to more everyday situations.

Collective neuroscience offers a different way of seeing neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, for example – not as instances of individual ‘dysfunctions’ in the brain, but as phenomena that emerge from multiple dynamic physiological and social processes. How does one get to the bottom of human cognition if we are intrin... See more

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.

the brain likely evolved to deal with the informational complexity of navigating and coordinating social relationships. If that’s true, she said, cognitive neuroscience that ignores sociality is probably pointless.

collective neuroscience involves reckoning with the science of complex systems, where causation is not linear but looping, and social and neuronal structures mesh in unpredictable ways.

The reason for this is that this cluster of fields of knowledge is interdependent on each other (the brain level affects the behaviour level, the behaviour level affects the behaviour of other brains...), and no single discipline is sufficient to answer the questions posed in Cognitive Science