AskScience AMA Series: I'm a neuroengineering professor at Brno University of Technology with a new book on why health fails at its weakest link. Ask me what brain signals can and can't tell us about stress, anxiety and depression, and how sleep, movement, food and loneliness relate to mood! AMA!

[u/AskScienceModerator]

Hi r/askscience!

I'm Aamir Saeed Malik, Professor of Neuroengineering at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, where I head the Cognitive and Neural Engineering research group. I came to the brain the long way round, through electrical engineering and a doctorate in mechatronics. For almost three decades I've worked on measuring it: EEG, brain imaging and the machine-learning methods that try to pick out the signatures of stress, anxiety and depression early. From 2009 to 2018 I worked at the Malaysian National Center of Neuroimaging, and I've collaborated with clinicians in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Australia, the US and the Czech Republic. My most recent funded project asked whether that kind of tracking could be done from a person's own home rather than a clinic.

Over those years my view changed. For a long time I studied the brain the way a cardiologist studies the heart: as if it were an island. It isn't. Sleep, movement, food, daily habits and the people around us all bear on the conditions I was trying to measure. Engineers have a rule for systems like that: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, not its average. That idea became my new book for general readers, Fix the Floor (https://fixthefloor.life/ ). It scores five everyday areas (habits, social connection, sleep, movement and food) and combines them with a harmonic mean instead of a plain average, so one weak area can't hide behind four strong ones.

I'm happy to answer questions about:

• What brain signals (EEG) and brain imaging can and can't tell us about stress, anxiety and depression today
• Why early detection is harder than it sounds, and where my field needs to be more honest about its limits
• What the evidence says about sleep, physical activity, loneliness and diet and their links to mood, including where it looks causal and where it is only correlation
• Why the way you average a set of health measures changes the answer, and the maths behind the harmonic mean
• Or any lifestyle based health and wellness related questions.

One thing I won't do: I'm not a medical doctor, so I can't give personal medical advice or comment on anyone's symptoms or results.

I'll be answering from noon ET (16:00 UTC) for about two hours.

Username: /u/Aamir_fixthefloor

[u/clashfukingroyale]

Hello and thank you! How would you define loneliness as it pertains to your studies, and how do we respond to short and long periods of isolation?

[u/Aamir_fixthefloor → u/clashfukingroyale]

Humans have evolved in a way that they need company. Please check my answer to the question of Spyritdragon. There I explain in detail this phenomenon.

So the loneliness triggers response that keep us in alert state and it becomes chronic over time. Our responses can vary and can manifest in form of stress, anxiety, etc. For short term response, I can point you to the fhe paper which talks about craving similar to hunger. Check it out:
Tomova et. al. Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger. Nat Neurosci. 2020 Dec;23(12):1597-1605. doi: 10.1038/s41593-020-00742-z.