Rosalind Picard, MIT

What Can We Discover About Emotions and the Brain from Noninvasive Measures?

Years ago, our team at MIT created sensors and machine learning algorithms to detect changes in human emotion.As we shrunk the sensors, made them wearable, and started to collect data24/7, wediscovered several surprises. For example, 100 years of psychophysiology research had described the autonomic “sweat” response occurring with emotional arousal as a general phenomenon across the body– activated with things such as hard cognitive effort or emotional stress (e.g., making your palms sweaty). To our surprise, we found this signal showing huge peaks on the wrist during non-REM sleep, and especially large and lateralized peaks on a single wrist during some kinds of seizures and some kinds of stress. In fact, it could even peak significantly when the EEG showed no cortical brain activity. This talk will highlight some of the most surprising findings along the journey of measuring emotion “in the wild” with implications for anxiety, depression, sleep-memory consolidation, epilepsy, autism, and more.Can these findings help us build non-invasive wearables to accurately forecast important changes in our physical and mental health?

Location: 337 Towne Building