The future of integrative neuroscience: The big questions

Revealing the Complexity of Fatigue: A Review of the Persistent Challenges and Promises of Artificial Intelligence

Part I reviews persistent challenges obstructing progress in understanding complex fatigue's biology. Difficulties quantifying subjective symptoms, mapping multi-factorial mechanisms, accounting for individual variation, enabling invasive sensing, overcoming research/funding insularity, and more are discussed. Part II explores how emerging artificial intelligence and machine and deep learning techniques can help address limitations through pattern recognition of complex physiological signatures as more objective biomarkers, predictive modeling to capture individual differences, consolidation of disjointed findings via data mining, and simulation to explore interventions. Conversational agents like Claude and ChatGPT also have potential to accelerate human fatigue research, but they currently lack capacities for robust autonomous contributions. Envisioned is an innovation timeline where synergistic application of enhanced neuroimaging, biosensors, closed-loop systems, and other advances combined with AI analytics could catalyze transformative progress in elucidating fatigue neural circuitry and treating associated conditions over the coming decades.

Being in Virtual Reality and Its Influence on Brain Health-An Overview of Benefits, Limitations and Prospects

BACKGROUND

Dynamic technological development and its enormous impact on modern societies are posing new challenges for 21st-century neuroscience. A special place is occupied by technologies based on virtual reality (VR). VR tools have already played a significant role in both basic and clinical neuroscience due to their high accuracy, sensitivity and specificity and, above all, high ecological value.

OBJECTIVE

Being in a digital world affects the functioning of the body as a whole and its individual systems. The data obtained so far, both from experimental and modeling studies, as well as (clinical) observations, indicate their great and promising potential, but apart from the benefits, there are also losses and negative consequences for users.

METHODS

This review was conducted according to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) framework across electronic databases (such as Web of Science Core Collection; PubMed; and Scopus, Taylor & Francis Online and Wiley Online Library) to identify beneficial effects and applications, as well as adverse impacts, especially on brain health in human neuroscience.

RESULTS

More than half of these articles were published within the last five years and represent state-of-the-art approaches and results (e.g., 54.7% in Web of Sciences and 63.4% in PubMed), with review papers accounting for approximately 16%. The results show that in addition to proposed novel devices and systems, various methods or procedures for testing, validation and standardization are presented (about 1% of articles). Also included are virtual developers and experts, (bio)(neuro)informatics specialists, neuroscientists and medical professionals.

CONCLUSIONS

VR environments allow for expanding the field of research on perception and cognitive and motor imagery, both in healthy and patient populations. In this context, research on neuroplasticity phenomena, including mirror neuron networks and the effects of applied virtual (mirror) tasks and training, is of interest in virtual prevention and neurogeriatrics, especially in neurotherapy and neurorehabilitation in basic/clinical and digital neuroscience.

Understanding the neural bases of bodily self-consciousness: recent achievements and main challenges

The last two decades have seen a surge of interest in the mechanisms underpinning bodily self-consciousness (BSC). Studies showed that BSC relies on several bodily experiences (i.e., self-location, body ownership, agency, first-person perspective) and multisensory integration. The aim of this literature review is to summarize new insights and novel developments into the understanding of the neural bases of BSC, such as the contribution of the interoceptive signals to the neural mechanisms of BSC, and the overlap with the neural bases of conscious experience in general and of higher-level forms of self (i.e., the cognitive self). We also identify the main challenges and propose future perspectives that need to be conducted to progress into the understanding of the neural mechanisms of BSC. In particular, we point the lack of crosstalk and cross-fertilization between subdisciplines of integrative neuroscience to better understand BSC, especially the lack of research in animal models to decipher the neural networks and systems of neurotransmitters underpinning BSC. We highlight the need for more causal evidence that specific brain areas are instrumental in generating BSC and the need for studies tapping into interindividual differences in the phenomenal experience of BSC and their underlying mechanisms.