Cognitive Technology

Abstract

In recent years, as brain science headlines have become common, the public awareness of neuroscience has skyrocketed. President George H. W. Bush’s “Decade of the Brain” in the 1980s led to the grassroots movement, “Decade of the Mind,” in the first decade of the twenty-first century and most recently the White House BRAIN initiative (Sacktor 1996; Albus et al. 2007; Alivisatos et al. 2012). This public awareness was not always so. Indeed, scientists who studied the brain, while being well represented among the Nobel Prizes of the twentieth century, did not even call themselves neuroscientists until the 1970s with the founding of the Society for Neuroscience. Even until the turn of the millennium, the popular view of the brain scientist was as primarily a psychologist (in a white lab coat) studying rats exploring a T-maze (Tolman and Honzik 1930). Relevant to the subject matter of this chapter, in the technological fields, the public also viewed transistor-based solid-state devices as inherently separated from the human brains that created them. All of the above have rapidly changed over the last decade, and we will argue in this chapter that the driver of change was a set of convergent neurotechnologies (NTs) that, taken together, are revolutionizing the discipline and, more importantly, are offering the potential for practical application in many areas of human activity.