January 15, 2007
What Enhancements are Available?
Another thing I did a while ago but maybe should blog is Cognitive Enhancement: A Review of Technology (in PDF). This is the review of enhancement technology I did for the ENHANCE project last year. I plan to extend it vastly this year with all the extra references and fields I have found. Stay tuned.
Overall there is a surprising amount of methods that give enhancement effects, but most are also pretty small. Still, chewing sage chewing gum while playing video games might sum up nicely and maybe even synergistically while still being pretty acceptable means to most. Looking at the initial sketch I made of what cognitive domains and what technologies have been applied (see this workshop report, page 2), there seem to be much space to explore. Both in terms of untested combinations (metacognition, can it be improved by meditation or software?) and in terms of developing the areas where we have evidence of enhancement (if chewing gum improves learning, can we make better learning improvement chewing gums?). Of course, for that to happen we need a better cultural and philosophical understanding of enhancement, since without it there will not be much support for doing the research.
While I'm still talking cognitive enhancement reviews, it is worth mentioning Moheb Costandi's nice review (he is the guy with the Neurophilosophy blog).
Posted by Anders3 at January 15, 2007 03:26 PM