Institute For The Future

Neurocentric Health: Moving into the Mainstream

 

In our recent research, the Health Horizons program has been tracking the continuing maturity of what we call neurocentric health--the idea that the brain is becoming the focal point of a wide range of medical research and a whole host of new diagnostic and treatment tools. Taking a 10-year view, these big shifts in medical paradigms help guide long-term thinking and planning, including, for example, a shift in how we think about the concept of normality. 

 

Guidelines for height/weight ratios, age/growth curves for kids, even bell curves for cholesterol and blood pressure gives doctors and their patients a way to map individual data onto larger population figures, and then to initiate behavioral, nutritional, or clinical strategies to bring one's "vitals" more in line with the norm.  Now, with advanced neuroimaging tools and a large database of brain data, neuroscientists are creating maps of normal brains, including developmental milestones and even measuring maturity levels. 

 

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have created just such a developmental roadmap of normal maturity on the brain. Says Bradley Schlaggar, a lead researcher on the project, "We can say, ‘This is the scan of somebody who has a maturity index of

0.8,’ and have a pretty good idea that they are in a normal

distribution for their chronological age.”

 

These neurocentric metrics for mental and emotional development will become part of the way identities are formed and regulated, creating whole new ways to understand ourselves, predict future development, and act accordingly on this information. 

 

Issues like new baselines for normality, shifts in brain-based identity markers, and the creation of new risk pools and metrics are very important for how we think about who we are and who we want to be. A neurocentric health perspective will help us understand these profound developments, and to steer them in directions that benefit us medically and socially. 

 

 

You can read the HC2020 Forecast Perspective on Neurocentric Health here.