1. Pay people to improve their mental health.
2. Create a new religion (sort of).
In Brazil, the state gives cash directly to the poorest families with children. Payments are contingent: to receive the money, the family’s children must attend school and get vaccinated. This benefits many others beyond the family. Society improves generally when more people are educated. Crime goes down, prospects improve for job seekers and companies, and investment in the country becomes more attractive. It’s also an efficient way to reduce poverty.
What if we could do something similar for Britain, that boosted the economy while helping the hardest up?
Britain is a knowledge economy. More than most, we earn with our minds. An equivalent British policy should therefore address mental wellbeing.
Mental health difficulties cost the UK over £120bn every year. It’s a staggering number that’s mainly the result of lost productivity at work and the cost of mental health care.
How can we reduce this figure?
Transcranial Focussed Ultrasound (TUS) is new method to manipulate brain activity. In theory and increasingly in practice, you can use it to help your mind behave as you want it to. It’s safe, non-invasive, and the technique has been highlighted by ARIA as a promising way to induce desirable brain behaviour.
Brian stimulation is a developing field, and the science behind it is not yet the slam dunk we’d like it to be. But the direction of travel in research suggests that in the near future, we’ll be able to meaningfully treat the commonest causes of mental suffering.
The NHS already uses other brain stimulation technologies to help people with problems like depression. So templates exist for how brain modulation devices can be deployed for the public.
There are millions of Brits we could probably help directly with this technology if it could be applied to those who need it. To come up with a policy that makes best use of it, let’s assume we reach a stage in the near future where the following is possible: devices exist that are safe, easy to use, and effective for treating chronic depression and anxiety.
Starting in NHS clinics, we could target the poorest families in the way the Bolsa Familia does. Pay people to ensure attendance, and do wonders for their mental health. Economic productivity improves and the UK’s care and welfare bills are reduced.
The programme would be simple, targeted, scalable, and efficient (direct cash transfers are relatively easy for state bureaucracies to arrange). It could use existing services through councils and clinics. The people most in need of help are already known to their local authorities.
The idea should appeal across political views as it’s a palatable kind of state aid: direct help for those who need it most, delivered with the aim of helping people to participate in the workforce.
Call it the Bolsa Mensa: the grant for the mind.*
So far, so good. But we can go much further.
Beyond the Bolsa
Fast forward, say, ten years. What might the tech plausibly do now?
1. One: address a range of medical conditions. E.g. Treatments for Alzheimer’s.
2. Two: Give people brains with 'high performance and good behaviour', by enhancing cognitive function and reducing common issues like anxiety and OCD.
3. Three: This is where things get interesting. In theory we may be able to develop induced experiences of mind. These are experiences of consciousness that are new, imagined, and designed, taking the form of code that is used to programme the brain modulation headsets. As pieces of software, the code can be owned, shared and even sold (the economic opportunities from this are a topic for another blog post). This new product could be called DICE: Designed Induced Conscious Experience.
There’s an enormous problem we can address with these.
Brits are ever more atomised, anxious, and risk averse – the young in particular. We’re a society of injured minds and dwindling social connections. This matters in itself, but it’s a compounding problem because we’re losing not just workers but future leaders and entrepreneurs. We can probably summarise our condition in a way that’s useful albeit imprecise: general social decay, characterised by fraying social bonds.
This is a very strange problem for a developed market economy to have. It’s a well-known problem that’s widely discussed. It’s crying out to be solved, in whole or piece by piece. Individuals, companies, families and governments all want to see it addressed, and would pay handsomely for solutions that reverse it.
Why aren’t there any good solutions? Why hasn’t the market created proposals that scale, given the financial rewards on offer?
It’s because nobody has a clue what to build. Another social app? Volunteering with VR? We’ve seen how that goes: we get more addictive phones that make people feel worse and become isolated. For all the recent advances we’ve had in technology, the only new possibilities for social interaction are through a screen.
Imagine something you could do something like this: a weekly gathering that’s somewhere between a church service, Glastonbury, meditation, and an excursion with your friends. We can build this with DICE. The key is to design an experience that brings people together, scales, and is best done regularly and with others.
The effects of TUS can be made to persist, possibly for up to a week. Imagine being able to give everyone at your gathering a special state of mind, that’s pro-social, feels fantastic, is accentuated by being in company, and lasts a week. You could do it on Sunday mornings.
The DICE which accompanies the session should be designed to work best when the user is in the company of people using the same programme. This will naturally incentivise getting together, rather than staying apart.
That’s a weekly service I would attend.
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| Concept render for a DICE Device |
Participation: the key ingredient
These gatherings might sound a long way from the initial Bolsa idea, but they’re an organic development from it.
If you want to build effective neurotechnology, you need reams of neural data. This is tedious and expensive to gather. But with appropriate consents and procedures, gathering useful data from participants could be built into the Bolsa programme from the outset. It’s a pragmatic and resourceful way to help build the ‘hard tech’ of this programme, i.e. the headsets and accompanying software. The DICE concept is speculative but not implausible, and if it can be done, it will be done with copious data and relevant expertise. These are ingredients the UK can bring together thanks to existing strengths in AI, neuroscience and engineering.
But the Bolsa policy should also be expanded to allow development of the ‘social technology’ that will put this hard tech to best use. What does a positive social gathering look like? Where could they be held? Willing participants in the programme could join with outside volunteers to experiment with form and content for the tech-enabled Sunday Service. This work should begin once stimulation protocols are capable enough to make the interaction of hard tech and social tech worth playing with.
*Mensa is, ahem, the Latin word for table. The word for ‘mind’ is ‘mens’. But ‘Bolsa Mensa’ is catchy, memorable, and gets the idea across.
This post is an entry for the TXP Progress Prize. Read about it here!
