Brains in Society: Preparing for Neuroscience’s Impact on Our Everyday Lives

Our understanding of the brain, one of the most complex structures in the known universe, has exploded over the past thirty years. From the “decade of the brain” in the 1990s through the BRAIN initiative over the last decade, we can now characterize how behavior emerges from physiology across a wide range of species, situations, and scales. A deeper understanding of the brain is urgent for many of the crises of the current moment. From brain disease, to mental health, to education, and beyond, the promise of neuroscience has been that a deeper understanding of neural mechanism will generate new approaches to the societal issues.The promise of neuroscience has been enormous, but the actual societal impact, up until this point, has been limited. But discovery is moving quickly and we are at the precipice of basic discoveries about how our brains work having a significant impact on our everyday lives – through new clinical interventions, neurotechnology, and neuroscience-based policy. We feel this shift on our campus. Rice recently launched the Rice Brain Institute to tackle these problems. The Center for Houston’s recently launched Project Metis, co-lead by Rice, to position our region as a global leader in brain health and the emerging brain economy and Rice is leading the Global Brain Economy Initiative which is the global action platform and convenor for the brain economy. The voters of Texas overwhelmingly supported the launch of the Dementia Prevention Research Institute of Texas (DPRIT) to prioritize neuroscience research in Texas aimed at improving the brain health of people in our state. But this shift from the promise of neuroscience to the reality of its impact is happening everywhere.

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The translation of neuroscientific discovery into societal impacts is an exciting prospect, and one that requires neuroscience to engage with a wider range of expertise. What are the kinds of knowledge that are needed for this new kind of translational neuroscience that have been missing from basic neuroscience research? How are brains shaped by socio-cultural factors? Just because we can control and manipulate neurons with the goal of mitigating disease, should we? How do neuroscience-based technologies and policy fit into existing societal systems and structures? During the three-day conference, we will explore these themes through a series of lively discussions and provocations by scientists, scholars and artists.