The Nueva School's Innovative Learning Conference

A fundamental challenge of society is the development of approaches to enhance cognition in both the healthy and impaired. For the healthy, this should be a core mission of our educational system, and for the cognitively impaired it is a major goal of our mental health care system. Unfortunately, neither of these systems has effectively met this challenge. I have come to believe that we are experiencing an emerging global cognition crisis (widespread deficits of attention, emotional regulation, decision making, empathy, compassion…). While it seems clear that technology has aggravated this crisis, it also offers a potential solution. I will describe a novel approach developed in our research center at UCSF — Neuroscape — that uses custom-designed, closed-loop video games to achieve meaningful and sustainable cognitive enhancement. I will also share with you the next stage of our efforts, which integrate closed-loop video games with the latest technological innovations in software and hardware, including virtual reality, motion capture, physiological wearable, artificial intelligence, and non-invasive brain stimulation. We need to be creative in how we address this grand challenge of enhancing human cognition.