Cognitive neuroscience

Neurons play the most vital role, since the main point is to establish an understanding of cognition from a neural perspective, along with the different lobes of the cerebral cortex.

These damages change the neural circuits in the brain and cause it to malfunction during basic cognitive processes, such as memory or learning.

People have learning disabilities and such damage, can be compared with how the healthy neural circuits are functioning, and possibly draw conclusions about the basis of the affected cognitive processes.

Although the task of cognitive neuroscience is to describe the neural mechanisms associated with the mind, historically it has progressed by investigating how a certain area of the brain supports a given mental faculty.

The founding insights in the Cognitive neuroscience establishment were: Philosophers have always been interested in the mind: "the idea that explaining a phenomenon involves understanding the mechanism responsible for it has deep roots in the History of Philosophy from atomic theories in 5th century B.C.

It has been suggested that the first person to believe otherwise was the Roman physician Galen in the second century AD, who declared that the brain was the source of mental activity,[28] although this has also been accredited to Alcmaeon.

In the early 19th century, Franz Joseph Gall and J. G. Spurzheim believed that the human brain was localized into approximately 35 different sections.

He discovered that the epileptic patients often made the same clonic and tonic movements of muscle during their seizures, leading Jackson to believe that they must be caused by activity in the same place in the brain every time.

This led to the proposition that individual functions are localized to specific areas of the brain rather than the cerebrum as a whole, as the aggregate field view suggests.

At the start of the 20th century, attitudes in America were characterized by pragmatism, which led to a preference for behaviorism as the primary approach in psychology.

[38] Several findings in the 20th century continued to advance the field, such as the discovery of ocular dominance columns, recording of single nerve cells in animals, and coordination of eye and head movements.

Wilder Penfield created maps of primary sensory and motor areas of the brain by stimulating the cortices of patients during surgery.

Although this is often thought of as a new method (most of the technology is relatively recent), the underlying principle goes back as far as 1878 when blood flow was first associated with brain function.

[9] Angelo Mosso, an Italian psychologist of the 19th century, had monitored the pulsations of the adult brain through neurosurgically created bony defects in the skulls of patients.

As experiments in cognitive neuroscience, what these have in common is that the researchers are measuring activities or behaviors that we can see, and then determining the neural basis of the function and what part of the brain is involved.

An upcoming technique in neuroscience is NIRS which uses light absorption to calculate changes in oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin in cortical areas.

Integrative neuroscience attempts to consolidate data in databases, and form unified descriptive models from various fields and scales: biology, psychology, anatomy, and clinical practice.

It describes a number of artificial neural network models which use supervised and unsupervised learning methods, and address problems such as pattern recognition and prediction.

[52] In 2014, Stanislas Dehaene, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Trevor Robbins, were awarded the Brain Prize "for their pioneering research on higher brain mechanisms underpinning such complex human functions as literacy, numeracy, motivated behaviour and social cognition, and for their efforts to understand cognitive and behavioural disorders".

[53] Brenda Milner, Marcus Raichle and John O'Keefe received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience "for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition"[54] and O'Keefe shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in the same year with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain".

[57] Advances in non-invasive functional neuroimaging and associated data analysis methods have also made it possible to use highly naturalistic stimuli and tasks such as feature films depicting social interactions in cognitive neuroscience studies.

This new technology has been used successfully in many experiments and it is helping researchers in observing brain activity and understanding its role in disease, behavior and function.

This group of researchers changed the software to collect data every 5 milliseconds, which is 8 times faster than what the normal technique captures.

By studying how the human brain processes information, researchers have developed AI systems that simulate cognitive functions like learning, pattern recognition, and decision-making.

For instance, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are modeled after the visual system and have transformed tasks like image recognition and speech analysis.

These tools provide valuable insights into neural activity, which help improve AI systems designed to mimic human thought processes.

Researchers are now exploring hybrid models that combine neural networks with symbolic reasoning to better mimic how humans think and solve problems.

[66] Noninvasive neurotherapy have attracted significant attention from the scientific community since, these methods can be personalized and used in treatment independent of underlying conditions.

[67] Based on research in cognitive neuroscience, Neurostimulation techniques apply different innovations to exert an energy-based impact on the nervous system by using electrical, magnetic, and/or electromagnetic energy to treat mental and physical health disorders in patients.

[66][67] Since Neurotherapy aims to heal without harm and implements systemic targeted delivery of an energy stimulus to a specific neurological zone in the body to alter neuronal activity and stimulate neuroplasticity, the recent trend in the Cognitive neuroscience is the research of natural neurostimulation.