Dr. Christian Beste: Fostering Innovation and Supporting Talents
Psychological Neuroscience: A Multidisciplinary Approach
Psychological Neuroscience is attractive for young scientists from different disciplines and for young scientists with different backgrounds/interests. The encounter of different perspectives on an identical scientific issue creates an essential momentum for scientific discourse, which is crucial for further knowledge gain and the individual scientific and personal development of young researchers. The complementarity of the research concept and the resulting scientific discourse enables a comprehensive training of young researchers, in which they learn from the beginning to approach a research object by means of different perspectives and to achieve the deepest possible insights into the research object through the integration of research perspectives. Science depends on creating collaborative opportunities and fostering a creative culture for people.
Creativity drives innovation and – in the long run – may have an economic impact and benefits people affected by mental health conditions. It is also a natural consequence of efforts to learn “from” and not only “about” mental health conditions. Research on “actions” would counteract itself if not translated into possibly useful deliverables and create societal impact. Dr. Christian Beste strives to unfold impact at two levels:
For one, his work receives inspiration from the needs of practitioners and he works closely with industrial partners and partners from structural health care and counseling to leverage the full potential of research in action control and its neurophysiological basis. This refers to the application of AI methods in brain signal analysis for diagnostic purposes in psychiatry and neurology, but also to build more efficient Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) as used in Neurofeedback approaches that provide real-time feedback used to train neural activity patterns to induce therapeutic effects. Through cooperations with industrial partners, a mobile neurofeedback device has been built that can be applied in the home-environments of affected individuals with or without the connection of virtual-reality (VR) approaches. This serves the needs of community medicine in mental health through the translation of psychological neuroscience principles.
For another, Dr. Christian Beste’s impetus is to work for neurodiverse people through his engagement in public knowledge transfer, for example through documentary films and podcasts. The agency’s projects are geared towards education and communication and are aimed at a broad, “colourful” audience.
The agency’s projects are geared towards education and communication and are aimed at a broad, “colourful” audience. The design of the projects follows the content-related necessities of a specific topic on the one hand and the developments in communication formats, e.g., in social media, on the other. Work here directly connects with research on neurodiversity. However, aside from these established forms to achieve public knowledge transfer, he is engaged in the development of serious games – in this case, the “Neuronauts-APP”. A general problem in health adherence is that only relatively abstract knowledge is conveyed by the doctor. However, knowing something and then acting stringently on it are two completely different things.
Dr. Christian Beste thinks it is important to use knowledge gained through his research on action control to help people become experts for their own physical and mental health. This is precisely where the “Neuronauts APP” comes in, using knowledge of action control and its neuronal implementation to translate knowledge into action and make it usable for health behavior. Through a broad variety of measures including social media, high-level interdisciplinary research reaches a broad audience and feedback from that audience is actively used in a “closed-loop approach” to inspire his research. This is relevant to empower people with mental health problems and closes ties with his engagement in open-access academic publishing (e.g. Section Editors | PLOS Mental Health; Editorial Board | Communications Biology (nature.com)).
