A wearable brain scanner will let people walk, talk, and move naturally while scientists record activity across the entire brain and spinal cord. Today’s neuroscience largely relies on patients lying still inside massive MRI machines, which cannot capture the real-world cognition that underpins everyday life. This project builds a dedicated facility to break those constraints. The team will develop lightweight, wearable imaging technology, design experiments that probe lived experiences—such as navigating a busy street or having a conversation—and create new analytical tools to model how the brain actually works outside the lab. If successful, this platform could transform understanding of neurological and mental health conditions. For example, studying a seizure as it unfolds during normal movement, or tracking social anxiety in a real interaction, could reveal mechanisms that static scans miss. That knowledge might eventually inform new strategies for maintaining brain function across the lifespan. This is primarily fundamental science—it aims to build the tools and theories needed to study the embodied brain in action. Past fundamental neuroscience advances, such as fMRI, similarly began as method-building before enabling clinical breakthroughs.
View original technical description
There is arguably no more important goal than understanding how the human brain supports daily life. However, the neuronal instantiation of lived experiences has eluded detailed scrutiny. Our proposed Platform seeks to change this and establish a new world of opportunity for neuroscience. We will create, at scale, an internationally unique facility dedicated to studying the embodied human brain as it engages with the real world. To do this we will overcome very significant and long-standing barriers to deliver: (1) transformative imaging technology capable of measuring neuronal activity from the entire brain and spinal cord that adults and children can wear comfortably while they behave naturally; (2) the capacity to deploy novel experimental designs that probe lived experiences in real-world settings; and (3) innovative analytics that will transform our mechanistic models of the brain, increasing their explanatory power and their capacity to inform new strategies for maintaining and improving brain function. Studying the real-world cognition that supports everyday life could revolutionise our understanding of lived experiences associated with neurological and mental health conditions, accelerating impactful discoveries that directly benefit the whole community. We will nurture a research culture of inclusivity, and can-do, bold, creative thinking to achieve these ambitious goals.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know