Sapien Labs

Rapid change in our physical, social, and technological environments is having a profound impact on our brains and minds. Our data shows 1) an enormous divergence in brain physiology depending on income and access to technology that has cognitive implications and 2) an overwhelming decrease in the mental wellbeing of each successively younger, internet-enabled generation at an alarming pace. 

We track how these changes are altering global mental and cognitive diversity in real-time to bring actionable insights for improvement to parents, educators, business leaders, clinicians, and policymakers. This mission is inherently cross-disciplinary and requires global collaboration and advocacy to move the needle on some of the biggest challenges facing the world today. The practical visionaries behind Elevate Prize, and those who will be in our fellow cohort of winners, similarly understand the potential power of tech & data and have concern for our collective future. The Elevate Prize will provide invaluable access to a partner network that can debate, discuss, and effectively translate our findings into action and, more importantly, help expand the depth and breadth of our visibility to build a global platform around our mission.

I founded Sapien Labs in 2016 driven to understand the impact and consequences of our changing environment and technology on the dynamical function of the human brain, particularly in the context of rising mental health concerns and growing social inequality. We developed the MHQ tool and started the Mental Health Million Project to understand population mental health and its social determinants. We’ve collected data from over 100,000 respondents spanning 10+ countries and our first annual report has gained widespread media attention and brought visibility to the importance of this work. We will increase our reach to 1 million respondents in 100+ countries and 30+ languages by 2025. 

Our Human Brain Diversity(HBD) project combines brain EEG with life experience and metabolic profiles to understand mental /cognitive outcomes across society. It is already active in India, Argentina and Sudan and will grow in scope over the next several years. We are now embarking on an effort to translate these insights into targeted, real-time, evidence-based strategies for brain and mental health interventions and preventative policies at a societal level through advocacy and products that will positively impact the lives of millions.

Our collective mental wellbeing and cognition determines global productivity and societal conflict. Our real-time surveillance of population brain health and mental wellbeing serves as an early warning system for emerging population risk factors along with actionable insights to improve wellbeing and create effective development agendas. For example, our MHQ data shows significant increases in adult mental health challenges with differing impacts of COVID-19 stressors on different demographics as well as an alarming, ongoing rise in mental health concerns among youth.

 Understanding the drivers behind these disparities is essential to informing transformative societal policies. Similarly, our human brain diversity project investigates the relationship between income, technology consumption, and stimulus(e.g. travel, education) and the resulting impact on brain physiology and cognition. This provides key insights for creating more effective development agendas that enhance cognitive abilities across low income populations. 

By openly and freely sharing our data and findings, we enable partner stakeholders (governments, NGOs, advocacy groups) to more effectively allocate resources to produce effective development operations and avert large-scale societal crises, potentially saving or improving thousands of lives from the consequences of poor mental health (e.g. substance abuse, suicide) and wasted development resources (e.g. failed infrastructure/education projects).

1. We uniquely combine rigorous academic research with the agility of a start-up and the global perspective of a humanitarian organization to bring important understanding to the direction of our collective humanity.

2. Our mental health assessment tool, bypasses the standard disorder silos to provide a comprehensive view of  the whole person. Unlike other tools, MHQ provides a tailored report that maintains anonymity, which helps recruit respondents, incentivizes high completion rates, and allows large-scale data acquisition at very low cost. This generates an ongoing, evolving dataset with deeper, more accurate, multifaceted insights of unrivaled sample size.

   

3. Our HBD project provides key insights into the relationship between brain physiology, income, and stimulus consumption. We have shown that while the caloric poverty line is ~$2/day, the stimulus poverty line is ~$30/day. Alarmingly, 80% of the world is currently financially unequipped for sufficient stimulus for full growth of the mind. This highlights a novel importance placed on social policies for universal education and enabling infrastructure and the imperative for understanding causal relationships between stimulus factors, brain physiology, and cognitive outcomes.

   

   

4. We are bringing together a partner ecosystem to align impact efforts for vulnerable populations identified by our work.

Our work helps manage and improve public health and wellbeing through 1) early identification of evolving mental/brain health challenges 2) strategically directing policy and programming to more effectively relieve societal suffering and distress, and enhanced positive functioning and 3) developing disruptive paradigms for understanding brain health and mental health disorders. Aggregate MHQ data provides insights for multi-sectoral stakeholders to strengthen social and economic policymaking and promote population mental wellbeing.

Understanding what drives advanced cognitive function through the HBD project will help direct development agendas to drive cognitive empowerment so that individuals are cognitively enabled to find their own solutions to global problems like poverty. We engage with partners through webinars, roundtable discussions, one-on-one conversations, and strategic planning cohorts to teach organizations how our data and insights can benefit decision-making. For example, we are working with Golden Seed in Arizona to propose the Arizona school system uses MHQ for effective measurement and management of students’ mental wellbeing. The resultant targeted, strategic public policies and interventions will help protect vulnerable populations from environmental and societal changes that negatively impact mental health and improve cognitive ability, ultimately helping improve global productivity and lessen the disparate access to mental/cognitive resources in developing countries.