Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry

The brain is most likely the center of our thought, our emotions, our communication, and other additional mental life. Unfortunately though, the brain is a difficult organ to study directly. Unlike other bodily organs, we cannot take a biopsy of brain tissue to study under the microscope until a person is deceased. Therefore we have used indirect means of assessing brain function such as:

• Imaging techniques with and without contrast
• Asking a person to perform a specific mental task while watching brain imaging

•     Stimulating parts of the brain during neurosurgery,

•     Examining the brains of diseased or disabled individuals looking for areas that do not

       “light up” during brain tasks

•    Measuring simple standardized mental tests such as the traditional mental status exam

Daniel Barron in his new book Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry now describes a new and potentially valuable method of elucidating and evaluating brain function as it relates to mental health and mental illness. With the advent of powerful computers and artificial intelligence, we can now collect large amounts of data from an almost limitless number of individuals that can be quickly sorted and catalogued. Labeled as “big data,” it has already been used for a variety of tasks including marketing, voting preferences, and population statistics. It has not as yet been used to measure brain function that can potentially be applied to clinical mental health treatment. While not truly a direct measure of brain activity, it is a new and potentially gold mine of information from which clinicians can measure and  systematically evaluate what happens in what has been often called the mysterious “black box” of the brain.

Computers and smart phones have now become almost universally used by individuals in first world countries. How we interact with our phones and computers reflects our emotional and mental state. With electronic posts, emotional text messages, emoticons, search histories, and frequency of website visitation (often referred to as our “digital exhaust”), we can follow a trail of a person’s behavior, emotional state, sociability with others, and linguistic characteristics. By using large numbers of individuals, it is possible to generate a reproducible set of characteristics that could be labeled as normal for humankind or a baseline for humanity as a whole.

Taken one individual at a time and by using sequential assessments, it becomes possible to observe the differences between an individual’s current set of characteristics from their individual baseline (e.g., how they had functioned in the past and how they may be functioning when they are ill). In the past we have been able to observe external actions and behaviors, but now we may add collective reflections of internal behavior. Beyond the use of computers, we can use data from an accelerometer (a device that measures the acceleration of movement), GPS positioning locators to see where we have traversed, call and text logs, as well as speech patterns.

It is also possible to apply benign “stress tests” (for example, difficult puzzles that may be predictable or unpredictable) and observe the patient’s reactions. Faced with an unpredictable puzzle, a patient with ADHD or an anxiety disorder may show signs of his/her illness that carry over to their assessment of the world in general. We could also use the response to such stress tests to more clearly document the beneficial effects of a particular medicine A when compared to medicine B.

Thus the author shines light on a new modality of assessing brain functioning that is not harmful to the patient but may give useful clinical information to the clinician for assessment and treatment. The book is short and in general easy to read. The author interestingly forecasts a new path to heighten the acumen of mental health professionals. Periodically the text covers computer terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader, but the author does a good job at explaining each one before he discusses them in more detail. This book would be useful to mental health professionals, but also could be quite interesting to the general public wishing to see one future path for psychiatry.

The brain is most likely the center of our thought, our emotions, our communication, and other additional mental life. Unfortunately though, the brain is a difficult organ to study directly. Unlike other bodily organs, we cannot take a biopsy of brain tissue to study under the microscope until a person is deceased. Therefore we have used indirect means of assessing brain function such as:

• Imaging techniques with and without contrast
• Asking a person to perform a specific mental task while watching brain imaging

•   Stimulating parts of the brain during neurosurgery,

•   Examining the brains of diseased or disabled individuals looking for areas that do not

       “light up” during brain tasks

•   Measuring simple standardized mental tests such as the traditional mental status exam

Daniel Barron in his new book Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry now describes a new and potentially valuable method of elucidating and evaluating brain function as it relates to mental health and mental illness. With the advent of powerful computers and artificial intelligence, we can now collect large amounts of data from an almost limitless number of individuals that can be quickly sorted and catalogued. Labeled as “big data,” it has already been used for a variety of tasks including marketing, voting preferences, and population statistics. It has not as yet been used to measure brain function that can potentially be applied to clinical mental health treatment. While not truly a direct measure of brain activity, it is a new and potentially gold mine of information from which clinicians can measure and  systematically evaluate what happens in what has been often called the mysterious “black box” of the brain.

Computers and smart phones have now become almost universally used by individuals in first world countries. How we interact with our phones and computers reflects our emotional and mental state. With electronic posts, emotional text messages, emoticons, search histories, and frequency of website visitation (often referred to as our “digital exhaust”), we can follow a trail of a person’s behavior, emotional state, sociability with others, and linguistic characteristics. By using large numbers of individuals, it is possible to generate a reproducible set of characteristics that could be labeled as normal for humankind or a baseline for humanity as a whole.

Taken one individual at a time and by using sequential assessments, it becomes possible to observe the differences between an individual’s current set of characteristics from their individual baseline (e.g., how they had functioned in the past and how they may be functioning when they are ill). In the past we have been able to observe external actions and behaviors, but now we may add collective reflections of internal behavior. Beyond the use of computers, we can use data from an accelerometer (a device that measures the acceleration of movement), GPS positioning locators to see where we have traversed, call and text logs, as well as speech patterns.

It is also possible to apply benign “stress tests” (for example, difficult puzzles that may be predictable or unpredictable) and observe the patient’s reactions. Faced with an unpredictable puzzle, a patient with ADHD or an anxiety disorder may show signs of his/her illness that carry over to their assessment of the world in general. We could also use the response to such stress tests to more clearly document the beneficial effects of a particular medicine A when compared to medicine B.

Thus the author shines light on a new modality of assessing brain functioning that is not harmful to the patient but may give useful clinical information to the clinician for assessment and treatment. The book is short and in general easy to read. The author interestingly forecasts a new path to heighten the acumen of mental health professionals. Periodically the text covers computer terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader, but the author does a good job at explaining each one before he discusses them in more detail. This book would be useful to mental health professionals, but also could be quite interesting to the general public wishing to see one future path for psychiatry.