Cognitive Design

Occasionally I blog on the impact of food and off-prescription use of drugs on cognition.  Although not a likely tool for the cognitive designer, they may have implications for those that design events, services and workflows.  And they are certainly relevant for those interested in augmented cognition and cognitive training.

 So the item in Medical News on Medical Impairment and Alzheimer’s Reversed by Caffeine in Mouse Model caught my eye.  The effect takes the equivalent of five cups a day but I do that. Most interesting, the researchers believe caffeine could be a treatment not just a preventative measure.

 This, along with the growing number of studies on how caffeine improves your cognitive performance on tasks that involve vigilance, helps to justify the faulty belief that caffeine is good for me!

Music has a powerful effect on how we think and feel.  There is some evidence that it enhances our cognitive performance. Imagine then BLABY, a wearable MP3 player designed to deliver music and a mother’s voice to her unborn baby. This is cognitive training in the womb.

[Source:  Economist, Food for Thought]

The FDA just approved (under the humanitarian device exception) a deep brain stimulation implant to help control treatment-resistive obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The device is aptly called Reclaim and was developed by Medtronic. According to an FDA press release: 

“The Reclaim system uses a small electrical generator known as a pulse generator to create electrical stimulation that blocks abnormal nerve signals in the brain. This small battery-powered device is implanted near the abdomen or the collar bone and connected to four electrodes implanted in the brain through an insulated electric wire known as the lead. Two device systems may be implanted to stimulate both sides of the brain or one device may be implanted with two lead outputs. ”

Not offered as a cure or even as a substitute for medication it is still a good example of how we are using insights from cognitive science to design new artifacts – in this case a therapy.   Additional applications (e.g. depression) are now in clinical trials.

A core principle in cognitive design is that we seek to  create artifacts based on an understanding of how minds actually work.   Further, there are five distinct types of minds we can design for including the individual, extended, group, emergent and machine minds.  Designs that combine insights into three or more types of mind into a single solution are often on the forefront of innovation.

For example, the participatory sensing projects at UCLA uses cell phones, individuals, groups and computers to gather information on decisions, behaviors and conditions across a geographic region to support a new form of collective intelligence and problem solving. Check out their Participatory Urban Sensing: Vision Video.

(more…)

“Based on our considerations, we call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.”

Or so argue seven highly credentialed scholars in their commentary in the prestigious journal Nature, titled, Towards the Responsible Use of Cognition-Enhancing Drugs by the Health.

Using prescription-only drugs such as Adderall or Ritalin, or entirely new drugs, to boost brain power would certainly provide a powerful new tool for cognitive designers or anyone interested in improving cognition.  Check out their argument in the article and let me know what you think.  Nature has also set up a public Forum for you to provide a personal answer to:

Should we use drugs to enhance cognitive performance?

Cognitive designers are always on the lookout for new functionality that supports or extends how people perceive, remember, think, feel and relate.

Telepresence or the ability to project yourself from a remote location has always been high on the list.  Talking from a speaker box, viewing from a web cam, or controlling devices remotely over the Internet (e.g. to collect vital signs in telehealth) are good examples of low-cost functionality that can be included in the cognitive design of distributed  educational, work or living systems.

 Telepresence is a growing consumer application. People want to be able to check on or visit their aging parents, children, new grand kids, pets or home from a remote location.  

iRobot is developing a new system ConnectR, to help us do that. This $500 personal robot will let us visit, move around in and interact with (see and speak) remote locations. In essence, ConnectR is a mobile camera with speakers, microphone and a headlight that you can control over the Internet.   

It is like having an avatar but for the real-world.   

It is not commercially released yet but you can see a demo on YouTube.

Part of designing for how minds work means engineering smarts into machines. This lowers the cognitive load on humans by giving the artifact itself the functionality for doing basic mental tasks.   For example,  complex office copiers have simple on-board smarts to help us troubleshoot paper jams, Bankers using expert underwriting systems give loan decisions in minutes and video games can read our frustration level and dynamically adjust the difficult of play.

 Today’s machines are getting pretty good at perception, decision making, natural language processing, autonomous navigation in rough terrains, planning and a wide range of activities that involve what we normally call intelligent. We are sneaking up on AI.

So cognitive designers must watch out for any new smart functionality that can be embedded in the artifacts they design. Along these lines, Cognitive Technology recently made an important announcement.

“We have taught the computer virtually all the meanings of words and phrases in the English language,” Cognition chief executive Scott Jarus told AFP. “This is clearly a building block for Web 3.0, or what is known as the Semantic Web. It has taken 30 years; it is a labour of love,”Jarus said.”  

 They call the product semantic map and you can try it out on their website to search Medline (health), a giant database of legal decisions and Wikipedia. An overview on how to try it out can be found in this video.

All on the Mind, a recent  story in the Economist talks about the current and future drugs that will enhance concentration, memory and learning.

Conclusion – “mind expansion may soon become big business”.

Two miltary contracts worth $11M have been awarded to develop binoculars that work directly with the brainwaves of soliders. The idea is that the brain often “sees” things before the mind can recognize them and objects “far a field” might not be recognized as threats in time.  

The goal, as reported by MSNBC is:

“Electrodes on the scalp inside a helmet will record the user’s brain activity as it processes information about high-resolution images produced by wide-angle military binoculars. Those responses will train the binoculars over time to recognize threats.”