$2.5M prize will fuel groundbreaking project to build AI models that capture the uniqueness of individual minds, potentially advancing mental health care
McGill neuroscientist and AI researcher Blake Richards has won a Schmidt Sciences Polymaths Award. Worth up to $2.5 million over five years, the prize will support work Richards said could reshape approaches to mental health care.
The project’s central aim is to move beyond the broad diagnostic categories used in psychology and psychiatry in favour of producing a more specific, accurate picture of how each person’s mind and brain function.
“In both neuroscience and psychology research, I see a disconnect between the simplified categories we employ and the messy, beautiful and irreducible complexity of individual human beings,” said Richards, an Associate Professor in School of Computer Science and Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, and principal investigator at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital). He also directs the Learning in Neural Circuits Lab at McGill, is a research scientist with the Paradigms of Intelligence team at Google, a core faculty member at Mila, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a CIFAR Learning in Machines and Brains Fellow. “We have become very good at averaging data across populations but remain surprisingly naive in characterizing any single person.”
This new project shifts the focus from the universal to the individual, from asking “How do brains learn?” to “What is the unique product of a lifetime of learning in this specific person?”
Richards and his team will build AI models of the mind trained to integrate diverse forms of data into a unified representation of each individual. The models will draw on familiar quantitative measures such as neuroimaging, genomics and cognitive test scores while also incorporating data typically overlooked in neuroscience and quantitative psychiatry, including personal narratives, cultural background, detailed life histories and creative outputs like writing, art and poetry.
Richards will partner with clinical researchers, psychologists, artists and video-game developers to design tools for the large-scale data collection required. The data will be combined with existing open data sets to train the AI models. Once developed, the models will be evaluated on their ability to predict real-world outcomes such as educational attainment or therapy response in previously unseen individuals.
“Rather than classifying or diagnosing individuals, the model’s objective would be to construct a holistic, navigable map of human minds, one that captures the complex interplay among biology, environment, culture and lived experience,” said Richards.
“Instead of asking, does this person have depression, we could ask, where does this individual lie in the vast space of human cognition, and what personalized interventions, be they pharmacological, therapeutic or educational, would move them towards a more desirable state,” he said.
Other potential applications include identifying novel subtypes of mental distress and predicting individual responses to treatment with far greater accuracy.
Richards’s project, titled “A foundation model for human neurotypes,” marks a significant departure from the central research questions that have defined his career to date.
Much of his previous work has been quantitative, focused on uncovering the general principles that enable brains and artificial neural networks to learn, including research on learning in neural circuits, reinforcement learning and self-supervised learning.
By bridging the “two cultures” of science and the humanities, Richards said he hopes the research program will offer a more humanistic and precise framework for understanding ourselves, one that combines the power of cutting-edge AI with a deep appreciation for the richness of human experience.
Richards is among eight scientists and engineers selected globally to receive the award.
Mental health conditions affect 1.2 billion people worldwide, with depression and anxiety disorders rising sharply since 2019. One-in-five Canadians will struggle with their mental health this year.