New Delhi [India], October 7: Far from the traditional power centers of neuroscience, a new kind of brain science is emerging, one that is less obsessed with neurons and more attuned to the lives they inhabit. At the Sapien Labs Centre for Human Brain and Mind, nestled within Krea University in India, Dr. Shailender Swaminathan and his team are attempting something audacious: reimagining how the world understands the human mind, not from the vantage point of elite labs or Western institutions, but by embedding neuroscience in the lives of ordinary people. Not patients. Not students. People.
Over the past few years, Sapien Labs has become a global authority on population-level mental wellbeing, powered by its signature “Mental Health Million” project, a data initiative of unprecedented scale that spans over 70 countries. But its most radical experiment may be taking place right here in India, where thousands of EEG scans are being collected not in ivory towers but in the everyday world: from rural hamlets to urban slums, across income brackets and occupations, mapping the invisible fingerprints of how we live, work, eat, and scroll.
“Our environment sculpts our brain. If we only study Western undergrads, we miss the plot,” says Dr. Swaminathan, a trained economist turned neuroscientist, who now helms one of the most ambitious datasets in the world on the intersection of experience and brain physiology.
The Sapien Labs model shatters the notion that neuroscience is only for the rich, the elite, or the well-wired. With a cost-per-participant of less than ₹10,000 (compared to over ₹3 lakhs in US-based studies like ABCD), they're proving that rigorous, real-time, large-scale brain research is not just possible in low- and middle-income countries, it may be the only way forward if we truly want answers that reflect humanity, not just its privileged sliver.
Their findings already hint at something deeply unsettling: ultra-processed foods, low fruit and vegetable intake, and smartphone overuse are not just lifestyle issues; they are sculptors of brain function, invisible architects of decline. And yet, in the mental health playbooks of governments and global institutions, those connections remain woefully absent. “India's mental health policy still treats distress as a therapeutic or psychiatric problem. But what if the causes are environmental? What if it's what we eat, how we live, how we relate, or don't?” Dr. Swaminathan asks.
As a 2023 Nature Neuroscience commentary observed, the MHQ offers “a unique lens into population-level brain function, contextualized by socio-economic and digital factors”, a perspective that could fundamentally shift how mental health is understood and addressed at scale.
It's this line of inquiry that makes Sapien Labs not just a data hub but a philosophical challenge to the status quo. They are pushing for transdiagnostic models of mental well-being metrics that don't just ask “Are you depressed?” but examine the texture of human flourishing across attention, connection, self-worth, sleep, trauma, and more.
And they're not waiting for the West to lead. Alongside partners in Tanzania, Sapien Labs is piloting the same low-cost, high-fidelity data systems, democratizing neuroscience for the Global South, while offering Europe and the US a more scalable alternative to traditional lab-bound research.
Their field-based models even allow for real-time evaluation of interventions: in the US, they've measured pre- and post-EEG signatures of teenagers attending phone-free summer camps. In India, their next frontier may be informing primary healthcare and guiding public policy, not just with more access to therapy, but by preventing mental breakdowns before they begin.
“We're trying to do for mental health what the Framingham Study did for heart disease,” says Swaminathan, referencing the mid-century public health milestone that revolutionised cardiac care worldwide. With over 4,300 EEG scans collected in India and a projected 10,000 per year in the pipeline, Sapien Labs is already stewarding the largest neurophysiological dataset on the subcontinent. And they're just getting started. Their ambition is not just scientific; it's infrastructural. Mental well-being, they argue, should be treated as a foundation of nation-building, no less critical than roads, water, or electricity. “What if every country had its own brain health dashboard?” Swaminathan wonders aloud. “What if mental resilience were seen as a civic asset?”
“We've long known that mental health doesn't exist in a vacuum,” says a senior clinician at NIMHANS. “But it's only now that research is starting to truly capture how experience, environment, and inequality shape the mind. This kind of work doesn't just measure mental health, it reframes it.”
The proposition is radical. But in a world where anxiety, isolation, and digital overwhelm are becoming endemic, and traditional approaches seem increasingly impotent, it may also be necessary. What emerges is not just a portrait of a pioneering institution but the birth of a new mental health paradigm, one that blends science with equity, data with empathy, and urgency with imagination. A paradigm that refuses to medicalise the mind in isolation but insists on understanding it in context, in food, in screens, in belonging and in touch.
Sapien Labs is building the mental infrastructure of the future. And in doing so, it is forcing the world to rethink what it means to be well.
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