Thanks to these recent insights from neuroscience and the development of tools able to restore impaired brain function, demands for upgrades to healthy cognitive functioning have steadily grown.¹ The field is making very rapid progress and by the end of the decade commercial systems for restoring communication are likely to emerge, as well as further advances being made in understanding how the brain turns thoughts into words.

Most existing investigations into Cognitive Enhancement have sought to restore it when deemed disordered or impaired, for example to aid people with incapacitating disorders of memory such as Alzheimer’s disease. More recently, new stakeholders have emerged in the race to monitor and boost cognitive states in healthy people. Imminent brain-monitoring technologies, aided by ever more capable AI, provide the ability to decode and alter cognitive and emotional states and make them increasingly transparent. Several employers already use monitoring, for example to ensure employees do not lose focus or concentration while driving or operating machinery.² Systems to enhance, rather than just monitor, cognition vary in their efficacy. Truly successful enhancement of healthy cognition will need to build on more specific, mechanistic theories.

The ability to monitor and change cognitive capacity is something many people want. This suggests that it will be widely adopted once the technology gets to a particular inflection point, and will yield unexpected applications across society. New privacy schemes must be developed and ethical guidance formalised ahead of these technologies, to ensure that this kind of data is protected, including "neurorights" and cognitive liberty. Even more urgent is governance around emerging ways to alter and improve cognition. Unanticipated societal outcomes are guaranteed, and society must be ready.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Progress is being made in understanding the Fundamentals of cognition, such as the baseline of “normal” function for tasks such as working memory or executive function. This allows researchers to explore the potential for enhancements, as well as monitor their effects when implemented. Monitoring of brain states using a variety of technologies is enabling greater understanding of how best to decode cognitive and emotional states, and to elucidate fundamental principles behind restoring functions such as speech and movement. There have been significant steps forward in the development of Neuromodulation systems that can change brain states through energy-delivering interventions such as electrical stimulation and drugs such as modafinil. The cognitive assistance we get from using computers and suitably developed and interfaced machine-learning algorithms offer the potential for Exogenous cognition, augmenting the natural abilities of the human brain. This might eventually include altered, enhanced or added body parts that stimulate new forms of cognition through the brain’s natural plasticity.