title: Brain enhancement through cognitive training: a new insight from brain connectome.
abstract: Owing to the recent advances in neurotechnology and the progress in understanding of brain cognitive functions, improvements of cognitive performance or acceleration of learning process with brain enhancement systems is not out of our reach anymore, on the contrary, it is a tangible target of contemporary research. Although a variety of approaches have been proposed, we will mainly focus on cognitive training interventions, in which learners repeatedly perform cognitive tasks to improve their cognitive abilities. In this review article, we propose that the learning process during the cognitive training can be facilitated by an assistive system monitoring cognitive workloads using electroencephalography (EEG) biomarkers, and the brain connectome approach can provide additional valuable biomarkers for facilitating leaners' learning processes. For the purpose, we will introduce studies on the cognitive training interventions, EEG biomarkers for cognitive workload, and human brain connectome. As cognitive overload and mental fatigue would reduce or even eliminate gains of cognitive training interventions, a real-time monitoring of cognitive workload can facilitate the learning process by flexibly adjusting difficulty levels of the training task. Moreover, cognitive training interventions should have effects on brain sub-networks, not on a single brain region, and graph theoretical network metrics quantifying topological architecture of the brain network can differentiate with respect to individual cognitive states as well as to different individuals' cognitive abilities, suggesting that the connectome is a valuable approach for tracking the learning progress. Although only a few studies have exploited the connectome approach for studying alterations of the brain network induced by cognitive training interventions so far, we believe that it would be a useful technique for capturing improvements of cognitive functions.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Life Sciences, Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE), National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Fumihiko
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Taya
authors.affiliation: Centre for Life Sciences, Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE), National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Yu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Medicine, University "Sapienza" of Rome Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Fabio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Babiloni
authors.affiliation: Centre for Life Sciences, Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE), National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore ; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore ; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Nitish
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Thakor
authors.affiliation: Centre for Life Sciences, Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE), National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Anastasios
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bezerianos
keywords: biomarkers; brain connectome; cognitive training; electroencephalography (EEG); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)