Science

NEURO ECOSYSTEM

Neuro is an innovative, neuroscience-informed social platform that improves neural literacy, helps people interact with information, and mobilises knowledge

Neurolenses

Which Neurolens are you?

Our brains experience the world differently, each to our own theme. These diverse outlooks are what make us intrinsically human.

Everyone loves how technology makes life easier in so many ways, but nobody ever wants it to replace the things that really matter to us. Technology should always serve humanity, and not the other way around. Sure, we’re happy to have help taking care of the dull, the dirty, the dangerous, and the dear; technology is at its best when it’s helping us become better people within stronger communities. Yet innovation isn’t always good. It can take us away from our loved ones, dull our creativity, strengthen divisive biases, make us forget about the real world, or capitalise on our human tendencies to chase dopamine, serotonin or endorphins. We each have a responsibility to engage with society in a way that nurtures our minds and those of our loved ones, with the emerging technologies we choose having the power to make massive difference at scale.

Here at Neuro, we’ve built our ecosystem around the core intersection points of humanity and technology that the latter could never, ever replace. We call these data features ‘Neurolenses’. These categories represent a variety of diverse ways that people interact with the world around us, and particularly, the differences in how we learn and interact with information. Our global team is equally distributed across all Neurolenses to bring plurality to our ecosystem’s approach of defining and solving problems. Our scientists at Neuro explore exciting hypotheses focused on each Neurolens, discovering how each of us learn and achieve meaningful goals. We’ve designed our Neurolenses using community consultation to give a voice to those who might not be so represented in circles where emerging technologies involving social media, search, ecommerce, media publishing, and science are designed and implemented.

Neural Literacy

We have noticed that those of us who see the world a certain way also process science, specialist knowledge, media, and lived experience differently; we all have unique ways of approaching, interacting with, and understanding information. We believe it’s important for providers of emerging technologies to care about the outlooks of those who trust their products. Neuro, as a community group, is invested in expanding neural literacy. This ability we each have to learn about our own brains, and our own patterns of assimilating information, is a necessary step towards the world establishing a pro-social, civic online space that authentically reflects the true beauty and diversity of the human condition.

By giving primacy to our Neurolens data, that represents the parts of humanity that technology will never be able to replace, Neuro works every day to preserve what makes us each unique. After all, we can’t truly work together learning about brains until we first understand the things that make us gloriously different from each other.

Data Model

Neuro’s Data Torus demonstrates in an accessible, conceptual way how we prioritise information within our data set and content management model. The continuity and inter-relatedness of torus components serve as a reminder of the reciprocation, connection and continuity needed within civic systems to keep them turning.

We believe that technology doesn’t need to know everything about us, —but the systems we trust should present the opportunity to be involved in building a civically-owned data set that actually matters, one that brings out the best of us all as members of humanity.

Such data needs to be accessible, explainable, and clearly understood by the community involved in its input and output. The Neuro Data Torus facilitates this happening, allowing us to conceptually discuss and gain feedback about ecosystem components and developments with all walks of life, whether our members have data science backgrounds or not.

The Data Torus is one of our favourite tools we use in community engagements on neural literacy. Neural literacy is a skill for the modern century, a time where we all have the responsibility to learn about our brains and how they interact with the world around us. By starting to talk about the data that helps us each approach, interact with, and understand information, we believe that communities will have the chance to become involved in their own digital futures. Ethical technologies have the capability to help align collective values, while still supporting context and individual difference. This all starts from inside the community, solving our most obvious problems together and advocating for ourselves.

Life Improvement Studies

Our mission is to mobilise knowledge together by engaging communities to build a social ecosystem that supports human flourishing. We are on our way to doing this using ethical technologies, systems thinking, and neuroethics as the backbones for our scientific progress.

We ‘do science’ throughout our nested ecosystem using the fundamentals of sociotechnical systems to facilitate measurable, replicable, positive change as a living community.

Science is an important pillar of the knowledge ecosystem across the world. As is the journalism that communicates this knowledge, and the specialism that mobilises knowledge in real life use cases, all working unison. And most important are the everyday people like you and I, whose lived experience give scientific knowledge its true meaning and context. The life breath in science are the participants in the studies, trials, practices and stories and that give individuals, families and communities their voices. We are the end users of scientific knowledge who use it to make improvements in our minds, our lives, our homes, our schools, our organisations, our regions, and our greater world – in which we’re all citizens.

The team at Neuro pride ourselves on our diversity, thoughout all areas, but also throughout the sciences. Our neuroscientists consult with our nurses. Our psychologists consult with our biologists. Our doctors consult with our neuroethicists. And everyone consults with our grassroots team of parents, artists, retirees, educators, musicians, creating science as we go. Together we all share our outlooks on the problems and solutions affecting online communities from a plurality of life experiences.

As a cohesive and inspired team, we have explored alternate architectures to social media platforms, content marketplaces, and knowledge mobilisation networks, building the following solutions into the backbone of our Neuro ecosystem:

Decentralised, distributed fact-checking via our accredited Neuro Peer network
Pro-social rewards for time spent on light, democratic peer reviews
Safe, pseudonymous publishing on sensitive topics that further community knowledge
Facilitation of academic outreach opportunities
Bestowment of financial grants for scientists furthering knowledge across Neurolens topics
Democratised recruitment for study participants who share values and goals
Values-aligned academic community and networking
Citizen science
Civic data models that prioritise a participants’ autonomy, agency, privacy and consent
Neural literacy wiki that includes sections on science literacy, neuromyths, cognitive biases, neuroscience terminology and more.

We believe that science exists best with community, and community exists best with science. We’ve never met a scientific fact that couldn’t be communicated, expanded on, and made more meaningful in engagement with the community it is applied to.