Real-World Applications in Cognitive Neuroscience

The challenge set in this volume was to give the reader a picture of how psychology and cognitive neuroscience has reached the stage of intellectual maturity where we can ask how it serves our daily lives, commerce, and society. As we have seen with biological sciences and medicine over the past century, the discipline has moved from the gathering of knowledge and increased understanding of discrete processes of the body, to the application of improving almost every aspect of health. Here we reflect on this transition, examining how developments in our existing knowledge of the brain and mind can be used to achieve practical insights into applied human behaviours. The components of the human mind explored by psychology, for example, attention, memory, perception, have remained remarkably constant over the past 50 years of psychological textbooks, yet the areas of life this discipline has ventured into is impressively broad. The work showcased in this volume, therefore, spans a wide array of aspects of daily living which rely on our cognitive, physiological and cyclical functions.