Our emerging neurosociety is being driven by many factors --

1. Mindful Donations Accelerate Basic Brain Research

• Allen Institute for Brain Science Announced with $100M:   Paul Allen is intrigued by how genes create intricate circuitry that controls all emotion, thinking and movement.  He said he expects to continue financing the institute after its first project — mapping the cells in the mouse brain — is complete in three to five years.
  
• Staglin Family Music Festival has raised over $22M:   With 100 percent of the expenses for the Festival underwritten by the Staglins, all proceeds go directly to scientific research through NARSAD (National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression) and several other research and treatment programs, including those at UCSF, Stanford University, UCLA, The University of Southern Florida, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, as well as Aldea, Inc. of Napa and Sonoma. This year’s festival raised $1.8 million with new $9.5 grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health for projects seed with Music Festival money.

2. Brain Imaging Breakthroughs Continue

Derek lucidly explains a new breakthrough in NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) brain imaging that "can be 10,000 times more sensitive than usual."  Another example of progress towards breaking the brain imaging bottleneck.

3. The Search for Meaning is Increasing

Shoshana Zuboff nails some fundamental issues driving our emerging neurosociety --

"We are the new individuals on the other side of this chasm—more educated, informed, experienced and connected than at any other time in history. There are hundreds of millions of us around the world. Above all, we seek psychological self-determination. We share an interest in taking our own lives into our own hands. We want to be the origins of our own meanings... We want to eliminate stress and hassle."