NLT’s Chief Scientist Ran Goldblatt, Ph.D., and his colleagues, including several other world-class researchers, have gone thru the long and arduous process of peer-review on their project “Global urbanicity is associated with brain and behavior in young people”, which was recently published in Nature Human Behaviour. This research, which started while Dr. Goldblatt was doing his post-doc at the University of California, San-Diego (UCSD), involved several research universities spread around the world to perform a first in a kind continental-scale analysis of the link between mental health, neuropsychology and urbanization. “We show that a remote-sensing satellite measure of urbanicity (UrbanSat) is correlated with brain volume, cortical surface area, and brain network connectivity in the medial prefrontal cortex and cerebellum,” said Dr. Goldblatt. According to Dr. Goldblatt, this study extends the application of remote-sensing satellite data and provides a method to characterize and monitor spatial and temporal patterns of risk for mental disorders. The authors concluded that UrbanSat provides a unique opportunity to identify the cumulative effects and susceptibility periods of urbanicity on brain and behaviour and could enable assessments of the correlations between urbanicity, mental illness and resilience, globally. The full paper can be read here.
