Our rapidly changing environment is profoundly altering our brains and minds.

Our rapidly changing environment is profoundly altering our brains and minds.

What does it mean for the future of society? How can we manage the risks?

We explore and track the evolving brain and mind of humanity

Our rapidly evolving socio-technological and physical environment are resulting in both a decline in our mental wellbeing and an increasing divergence in our brain physiology. We are here to track and understand these trends and accelerate the path from data to insights to real-world action as a path to our mission to understand and enable the human mind.

Mental Wellbeing

We track evolving mental wellbeing across the globe through the Mental Health Million project, identify key socio-cultural factors that can lead to strategies to preventatively address the generational decline, and enable Organizations, Schools and Universities to measure and manage mental wellbeing through preventative strategies and appropriate resource allocation.

Centers for Human Brain and Mind

Our recently launched Centers for Human Brain and Mind bring together cross-disciplinary perspectives coupled with an unparalleled multi-dimensional human data acquisition infrastructure for global insights into how our socio-cultural, technological, nutrient and toxin environments impact our brain physiology and in turn our mental outcomes. Our first Centers are presently at Krea University in India and NM-AIST in Tanzania.

RESEARCH INSIGHTS

We take a cross disciplinary approach to understanding the influence of environment on brain and the relationship between brain and mental outcomes. Our research spans development of new tools for measurement, new approaches to signal processing and large-scale data acquisition and analytics.

Mental Wellbeing Evolves with Circumstance. The Pandemic had a Big Effect.

Across the global English speaking population overall mental wellbeing declined 24 points in 2020 relative to 2019 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The percentage of the population with clinical level mental health risks rose from 14% to 26%.

Read more in the Mental State of the World 2020

A Progressive Generational Decline in Mental wellbeing has been exacerbated by the Pandemic

It used to be that younger people and older people fared better with a dip in middle age – known as the U-shaped curve of happiness. No longer. Younger generations have increasingly worse mental wellbeing overall and mood and outlook. 44% of those 18-24 have clinical level risks and challenges compared to only 6% of those 65+. This generational decline, already present in 2019 was exacerbated by the pandemic.

Read more in the Mental State of the World 2020

Complexity increases with Stimulus Consumption

The brain ‘consumes’ stimulus that informs its wiring, development and behavior. Major things like education, transport and cell phones expand the scope and pace of stimulus the brain receives.

Complexity of the brain signal measured by EEG, or electrodes on the scalp, increases with aggregate consumption of these stimulus expanding factors. Complexity reflects the diversity of waveform patterns in the signal and may have significant cognitive consequences.

Read more in Nature Scientific Reports

Disparity in Stimulus Access and Consumption Results in Disparities in Brain Signals

There are many disparities in the brain signal between those with access and means to consume greater stimulus and those without. This shows the distribution of a feature of the brain signal called the Alpha oscillation between two extremes – those who are rural, less than primary educated and with no technology compared to those college-educated and digitally enabled.

The Alpha oscillation is thought to have a role in attention and mental imagery.

Read more in Nature Scientific Reports

Key program areas

Human Brain Diversity

Human Brain Diversity
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Mental Health Million

Mental Health
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Exploratory Research

Exploratory Research
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Lab Talk

Part journal club, part musing, we blog here about interesting and open questions in human neuroscience as well as new tools and approaches to research.

Mentalog

Mentalog is our blog on mental wellbeing. How to interpret your own, understand it in a population context and how to measure and manage it within organizations.