Intelligence is the Missing Survival Link

Yet IQ, brain size and mental health are in rapid decline. Scandinavian research says IQ is falling by about 7% a generation. Brain volume, based on skull size, has decreased by 20% in the last 20,000 years or so. Rates in mental illness and neurodegeneration are escalating across all ages in seemingly all countries.

We do not just need a few super-bright people, although that helps, if the populous is dumbing down. That’s a recipe for dictatorship. We need the majority to ‘wise up’ – both the young, because they are the future, and the elders because they hold knowledge from experience. (I like Isabelle Allende’s definition of experience as ‘what you learn just after you needed to know it’.)

In China, for example, the ‘silver haired economy of people over the age of 60 comprises 300 million people. The tragedy, of course, is that many are drifting into dementia and losing the memory of all that has been learned.

Protecting Our Brains

That is why, along with peace, climate, ecology and sustainable energy activism, foodforthebrain.org’s mission to protect and promote intelligence and mental health must become global and scaled up if we are to survive.

The acceleration of societal change in the digital age, compared to the industrial age, will be rapidly surpassed by the age of artificial intelligence.

Resistance is futile. For us, on a mission to protect and promote mental health and enhance intelligence, AI opens up the possibility to make our COGNITION programme available to all, in any language, and learn from the experience of thousands, what messaging really helps drive positive behaviour change to promote mental health and intelligence.

Doing it Ourselves

Of course, we would like all this taught in schools and prioritised in healthcare, but we cannot afford to wait for the corrupted governmental bureaucracies to paradigm shift. So called healthcare, in most countries, remains deeply in the claws of big Pharma and big food.

Putting prevention before profit is not even in their futuristic sights whether one votes left or right. In the UK, for example, the NHS remains the fastest growing failing business, with no plans for preventing disease. The latest person put in charge of prevention, Professor John Deanfield, is paid by and has shares in pharma, and considers prevention to be achieved by more drugs to more people earlier despite the fact that the crippling diseases we have created in the 21 century were never caused by a lack of drugs.

Hence, we have to ‘do it ourselves’, direct to the public, people telling people, funded by people – citizen science and education at its best. Our impact may be small to start with without significant funding or buy-in from progressive countries, but both are increasingly likely as the mental health meltdown becomes epidemic and the cost of dementia crises will linger and the breakdown in children’s mental health upon which our future depends, catastrophic. Who will care for the billions with neurodegeneration? This is not a problem that is going away.

China is a case in point. There are 300 million over 60 and the estimated annual cost of dementia will exceed $1 trillion in the next decade. Do we ‘make Britain dementia friendly’ and pour yet more money into our failing health services or do we end dementia? The scientific fact is that less than one in a hundred cases of Alzheimer’s are caused by genes. Theoretically, 99 per cent could be prevented with nutrition and lifestyle changes. It isn’t actually that difficult.

Make the Mission Global

This is not a pipe dream. Next year Food for the Brain are targeting 18 million over 60-year olds in China with the blessing and collaboration of the former minister and vice-minister of health, both now ‘silver-haired’. What they are doing – personalising and popularising prevention – is doable on a global scale precisely because we are in a digital age. AI allows us to break down the barrier of language.

How to Support

Please support Food for the Brain in three ways:

Take the Cognitive Function test yourself at foodforthebrain.org. That 30 minutes of your time makes you a Citizen Scientist because your anonymised data helps us research what really work for prevention.

Become a FRIEND of foodforthebrain.org contributing £50 a year. That is how we have reached several million so far, tested half a million and fund building the technology to reach millions more with translations in all languages.

Donate whatever you can – time, skills or money. We are a small but mighty team and literally every £10 helps. For example, right now, we are building the same things for children, teens and their parents – COGNITION for Smart Kids. It’s a £25,000 build and we’ve raised about £10,000. We hope to launch in April – 100 days to go – £100 a day. That’s what we need. If 100 people gave £100 we can reach millions of parents and children.  Alternatively, volunteer and share your skills.