Dr. Tara Thiagarajan: “I’ve created a dashboard to illustrate the inter-relatedness of my mental and metabolic machinery .”

Azure Grant

May 30, 2017

While the terms ”dashboard” and ”machinery” may bring to mind the tidy and separable systems operating within a car, it’s the crossed wires of human neurophysiology that will be the subject of this conference preview. Though western medicine tends to treat physiological systems (cognition, digestion, hormonal axes) as disparate, centuries of wisdom and mounting scientific data suggest a great depth of inter-relatedness across physiological systems. Ancient thinkers like Plutarch, Ptolemy and Boethius have gone as far as to describe the interactions between human systems as musical chords – harmonious when healthy, dissonant when ill:

“Whoever penetrates into his own self perceives human music. For what unites the incorporeal nature of reason with the body if not a certain harmony and, as it were, a careful tuning of low and high pitches as though producing one consonance” – Boethius, Fundamentals of Music

At QS17, only a few weeks away, Tara will bring her background in math and neuroscience to show us how she has captured her ‘human music‘ by looking at interactions between her sleep, diet, water intake, and brain activity. Tara is the founder of Sapien Labs, which seeks to use EEG technology in a broad and more accessible context to generate massive data sets of human brain activity. She’s one of many excellent speakers presenting novel connections in personal data – check out our other participants and join us there!