Minds on the Edge: AI, Gaming, and Mental Health

Mental health is immensely complex. Unlike a broken bone or an infection, there’s no simple test for what’s going wrong in someone’s mind. In this talk, I’ll take you behind the scenes of our lab’s attempts to tackle this problem. I’ll share how we’re using smartphones and AI to predict suicide and self-harm, and building mathematical models to understand how someone’s mental state can spiral and tip over an edge. I hope you’ll leave with a new way of thinking about mental health: not a simple on/off switch, but more like the weather – constantly shifting, and with the right tools, maybe a bit more foreseeable.

Video gaming is a hobby loved by billions worldwide. However, some individuals develop gaming disorder, which is an addiction formally recognized by the World Health Organization. In this talk, Dr. Park will explore the fascinating evolution and culture of video games, the neuroscience of gaming disorder, and novel treatments to tackle this public health concern. Blending neuroscience, psychiatry, and policy, Dr. Park will share her academic journey and insights from her research (e.g., including the use of machine learning) to better understand gaming disorder and develop new treatments.

We think of perception as gathering information our world, from the outside in. In this talk I will show that the opposite is sometime true; that what we expect or believe can influence what we perceive. This has consequences for how we think about the mind and brain, in particular how we understand people who hallucinate and have unusual beliefs.