Overview
The goals of the Citizen Brain project include creating three Citizen Brain videos (in addition to two previously created), distributing and promoting these videos to reach a wide audience, and compiling the finished videos into a standalone five-video series for broadcast on TV or a streaming platform. The three videos cover loneliness, othering, and zeal vs. doubt, in addition to two previous videos exploring empathy and ageism.
The [project] gave me this unbelievable new angle on all these things I’ve been preoccupied with — in politics, on what human nature is, on revolution — through this fascinating, totally new subject to me, brain science and brain health.
Project Details
For years Josh Kornbluth, who writes and hosts the “Citizen Brain” series, has been performing his autobiographical monologues for theater audiences all over the U.S. (and occasionally in other countries as well). In 2017, he signed on as an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI), later serving as a Hellman Visiting Artist at UCSF's Memory and Aging Center.
“The videos illustrate how learning about science can help us be better citizens,” Kornbluth says. “I’ve spent over 25 years telling stories about trying to make this a better world, and now I see myself as an interface between the science of brain health and the world of social justice. I believe in democracy as an expression of empathy, and I want to start a peaceful worldwide revolution of empathy.”
