Cognitive Science and Novel Medical Technologies

Cognitive science is one of the fastest growing segments of modern interdisciplinary research into the functions of consciousness and into mechanisms implementing these functions in the brain. One of the impressive results of this research has been the emergence of novel scientific disciplines (cognitive ergonomics and neuroergonomics, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing) and a whole class of technological contributions in medicine and related life sciences. In this country, the relevant studies are conducted within the Interregional Association for Cognitive Studies (IACS) on the basis of the National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”. The authors of this article work in the Kurchatov Institute and represent the leadership of the IACS: Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences B.M. Velichkovsky — the founder and first president of this Association (2006–2010) and V.L. Ushakov — the current president of IACS since 2018.

The article provides an overview of current neurocognitive research, combining fundamental issues with practical applications. The author describes the studies under way at the National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” aimed at creating new types of human-machine interfaces, which are intended to replace the traditional graphic interfaces created for users at early stages of cognitive science. These studies concentrate on visual attention and voluntary oculomotor behavior. The methods and results of exploring the macroscale brain mechanisms are presented. Modern methods, such as ultrafast functional magnetic resonance imaging and dynamic causal modeling, allow one to non-invasively reconstruct the picture of cause-effect interactions in the human brain both at rest and at solving various tasks. Using these methods, it became possible, for the first time, to investigate the interaction between different brain mechanisms attributed to different evolutionary levels of its organization, namely, the oldest, old, new and newest cortex. An example of the first is the hippocampus, and that of the newest is the front-polar areas of the frontal lobes. As a result, new data on the asymmetry of the human brain in health and disease were obtained, indicating the importance of the interhemispheric asymmetry and the right hemisphere dominance over the effective (cause-effect) connections during normal functioning of the brain and consciousness at rest. The authors emphasize that the macroscale organization can and should be studied in the context of molecular mechanisms of the respective neural networks in the human brain.

The expression of protein-encoding genes in the frontal-polar regions of the cortex is presented. In this study, the right-sided dominance was also found but this time regarding the number of expressed genes associated with the risk of schizophrenia. However, no association with major neurodegenerative diseases was found.

Diagnosis of consciousness has always played an important role in medicine. To date, a communicative contact with the patient remains the main test of the consciousness integrity. Along with that, the significance of objective methods is growing. There are arguments that the modeling of consciousness and the respective implementation are the most important factors of further progress in the area of cognitive technologies and machine “intelligence”.

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Velichkovsky B.M., Ushakov V.L. Cognitive Science and Novel Medical Technologies. Sovremennye tehnologii v medicine 2019; 11(1): 8, https://doi.org/10.17691/stm2019.11.1.01