Why the World Needs More People, According to These Experts
The highest number of births the planet has ever seen was in 2012, when 146 million children were born. The global population has continued to increase since then, even though the birth rate has fallen, largely because the world has gotten better at preventing the deaths of children. But now people are having smaller families, and in the next half century or so, death rates will exceed birth rates. That's what the two associate professors of economics at the University of Texas at Austin refer to as "the spike," the period of sharp growth and possibly equally sharp decline in population.
Spears, who is also the founder of r.i.c.e., the Research Institute of Compassionate Economics, which is focused on child health in Uttar Pradesh, has seen this process happen in real time in India where the average birth rate (i.e. the average number of children a woman will give birth to in her lifetime) has dropped to fewer than two as the country has got more prosperous.
TIME spoke to Spears and Geruso about why there should not be fewer people on a planet that feels like it's straining to sustain the 8 billion we have, why people around the world are choosing to keep their families small, and what, if anything, should be done.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
For years, people have been working under the assumption that the planet has too many people, and we need to pump the brakes a bit on population. Is this not true?
Spears: Depopulation is now the most likely future. In a few decades, the world's population will stop growing and begin to decline, and there's no reason to believe that once that happens, it'll automatically reverse. So a big question before us is, should we welcome that or should we want something else to happen?
Why won't the population fall a bit and then just stabilize?
Michael Geruso: The key number here is two. Without two children in the next generation to replace two parents in the prior generation, the generations will shrink, and that will happen whether the population level is 10 billion or more, or if the population is tiny. I think it could continue to make sense for people's individual lives to decide that something that averages out to about 1.6 kids, like in the U.S. today or 1.4 kids, like in Europe, is the right choice for them.
During drought conditions, kangaroos don't breed, but when conditions improve, they start again. Why do you think that people will not start having more children again?
Spears: People are unlike kangaroos in that they make decisions in response to their societies, their cultures, their families, their economies. And for centuries, the decisions that people have been making have been moving towards lower and lower birth rates—from a worldwide average of six in 1800 to five and a half in 1900 to five in 1950 and less than half of that now. It's been a long-term trajectory down; it hasn't been just a response to immediate conditions. For that to stop and turn around would be a reversal of a big trend when all of the social and economic and cultural and family reasons that people are having fewer children probably aren't just going to disappear.
There are 26 countries where the birth rate has fallen below replacement since 1950 and it has never risen again, even though those countries' populations have grown because of lower infant mortality or immigration. Why does the birth rate stay down?
Geruso: Well, everybody has a different theory. Some people talk about contraception, and contraception is super important. But contraception isn't going to explain, for example, why the birth rate in Sweden has declined from 1.9 to 1.4 over the last decade. It wasn't because in 2015 women in Sweden got access to the pill for the first time. We've heard people talk about the decline in marriage. We've heard people talk about a retreat from religion and tradition. But we see birth rates converging to low levels everywhere around the world, in rich places, in poor places, in places where religion is important, in places that are receding from religion, in places where marriage remains nearly universal. Part of the big challenge here is that social scientists, policymakers, researchers don't yet have a very firm grasp on the exact causes.
Don't more people mean more environmental harm, more deforestation, more carbon emissions, more sprawl?
Spears: Yes, we have big environmental challenges. And it's natural to think that the way to protect the environment is to have fewer humans. What we say in After the Spike is that the idea that depopulation is the way to confront our environmental challenges now doesn't consider the history of how we've made environmental progress. One of the environmental challenges in the 1960s and 1970s was that we were burning leaded gasoline in our vehicles. The way that in the United States it was solved was through the Clean Air Act of 1970 and various amendments that phased out the use of leaded gas. The way that the world solved the problem of ozone depletion was to ban the use of chlorofluorocarbons in the Montreal Protocol. Every time we've made progress against an environmental challenge before, it's been while the population was growing, by addressing the challenge directly.
But there is a limited supply of resources. Won't there be more conflict over land or water or nonrenewable resources if there are more people?
Spears: We're not advocating for endless population growth generation after generation. What we're proposing is that we should consider whether we should welcome depopulation, remaking the future by default, or if instead it would be better for the world's population to stabilize at some level, perhaps at a level much lower than today's. After the population peaks and begins to decline, which is overwhelmingly the most likely future, if you want a stabilized population someday, then the birth rate would have to rise to go back up, and basically you have the same sort of question to answer, which is, how in that future would we get to an average birth rate of two children for two adults?
What are the positive sides of a bigger population?
Geruso: At a fundamental level—although we don't always feel it and we don't always recognize it, and then we don't always credit it—other people are good for us. What separates life now from life a couple of hundred years ago—when as many as half of children died before adulthood, when people didn't have basic material security, when extreme poverty was above 80% of the world, as opposed to today, where it's below 15%—is the work, the ideas, the innovation, the progress. What's made that progress so spectacular is that many minds have been at work, sharing knowledge, learning things, and building the progress that we all now get to enjoy.
The population decline is predicted to start in about 2080. Won't the people of 2080 begin to see 'Hey, we need more people"?
Spears: Right now, in 2025 we don't have all of the answers that we need for the fight against climate change, but we're in a lot better position than we would have been if people hadn't been thinking about it and working on it for decades. The year 2080—or 2084 as the U.N. says—is about six decades from now. Six decades ago, people knew some big-picture facts about climate change. People were starting the scientific research, starting to build a social and political movement to understand that decarbonizing was a good idea. That left us in a better position today to make the decisions and implement the changes that we need to make. We have the option to get started today talking about what sort of future we should try to be building for the next generations, whether we should be trying to make parenting better, fairer, easier, more supported, whether we should welcome depopulation or prefer something else. We can be doing that research, building that sort of social consensus, so that as the decades go on, people are in a better position to deal with the challenges that they'll face.
Isn't climate change different because we are dealing with something that we don't exactly know how to solve whereas we do know how to have children?
Geruso: I actually think the analogy is quite close, where we could, for a very long time, live in a world where each person's individual decision that makes sense for them might be to continue emitting carbon, might be to continue having smaller families, and they should, in the case of fertility, be free to make those choices. And so we have a big question and a big challenge, which is, how can we build a world in which people who aspire to have more children feel supported, feel able to have those larger families, to choose to have a family in the first place, to choose to have children in the first place?
Are there any countries that are over-performing in your terms? And are there qualities of those countries that we could seek to emulate, or is it mostly poverty and the need to have more children?
Spears: About two-thirds of people around the world live in a country where the birth rate is below two, meaning about a third of the people live in a country where it isn't. But essentially everywhere, over a long enough horizon, birth rates are falling. So in sub-Saharan Africa, the birth rate now is 4.3, but it was 5 in 2014 and it was 6.4 in 1950, so it's falling there too. The level of secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa for girls was not so different than it was in India a few decades ago, and the birth rate in Africa is not so different than it was in India a few decades ago. The population of Africa is going to keep growing within the 21st century. There are 1.2 billion people living there now. It'll be up to around 3 billion at the end of the century. They're just at a different place on the path to where higher living standards and lower birth rates have tended to go together.
So are humans the opposite of kangaroos? When conditions are good, do we stop having as many children instead of when conditions are tough?
Spears: Here in the U.S. what we most commonly hear is that people aren't having children because kids just aren't affordable; the price of childcare and housing and college are all so much higher than they used to be. But we don't see richer people within societies having these large families, we see richer countries having lower birth rates on average, and we see a long-term trend, where as countries are experiencing higher living standards, they also tend to be getting lower birth rates.
What are the key things that should be done now to stabilize the population?
Geruso: Today, I think relatively few people would come into a conversation about low birth rates with the view that other people on the planet make life better for all of us. If we will ever bend humanity's path away from global depopulation, that would need a major investment in reorganization of our economy, of our institutions, of our cultures, to support and prioritize parenting and caregiving. And there's no reason to think that that serious investment is going to happen as long as we're hanging on to these anti-people sentiments. So the first step has to be a broad understanding that we all benefit from living in a big world. That has to come before any policy recommendations.
One of the reasons you wrote the book is that you want 'kinder people' to talk about the challenges of depopulation, as well as people who are creating fear about it to push an agenda. It sounds a bit like you think that the right has hijacked the pro-people argument—that you're trying to bring people who consider themselves progressive into the idea that population is good.
Geruso: There's a problem where sometimes Democrats, liberals, progressives accept the implicit assumption in the conservative view, which is that if we were to talk about the social value of raising birth rates, then we must be talking about some sort of regression on gender equity and progress for women. The reason why we should reject that assumption is because we shouldn't believe that children are just the responsibility of women. They're the responsibility of all of us.
Spears: My research is about India. Part of what we're doing is trying to lift everybody's gaze up a bit to the fact that low birth rates and a future of depopulation is something that's a globally shared situation, that the birth rate in India isn't so different from the birth rate in the United States and that we're all on a shared path together to global depopulation.
You're both fathers. How many children do you each have?
Geruso: I have one kid—an 11-year-old.
Spears: I've got two kiddos. You'll see in the book how that happened.
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Time Magazine
5 days ago
- Time Magazine
Why the World Needs More People, According to These Experts
In their new book After the Spike, demographers Dean Spears and Michael Geruso make the counterintuitive case for worrying less about overpopulation and more about depopulation. Comparing it to climate change, they say population shrinkage is coming and once it starts it could be hard to stop. The highest number of births the planet has ever seen was in 2012, when 146 million children were born. The global population has continued to increase since then, even though the birth rate has fallen, largely because the world has gotten better at preventing the deaths of children. But now people are having smaller families, and in the next half century or so, death rates will exceed birth rates. That's what the two associate professors of economics at the University of Texas at Austin refer to as "the spike," the period of sharp growth and possibly equally sharp decline in population. Spears, who is also the founder of r.i.c.e., the Research Institute of Compassionate Economics, which is focused on child health in Uttar Pradesh, has seen this process happen in real time in India where the average birth rate (i.e. the average number of children a woman will give birth to in her lifetime) has dropped to fewer than two as the country has got more prosperous. TIME spoke to Spears and Geruso about why there should not be fewer people on a planet that feels like it's straining to sustain the 8 billion we have, why people around the world are choosing to keep their families small, and what, if anything, should be done. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. For years, people have been working under the assumption that the planet has too many people, and we need to pump the brakes a bit on population. Is this not true? Spears: Depopulation is now the most likely future. In a few decades, the world's population will stop growing and begin to decline, and there's no reason to believe that once that happens, it'll automatically reverse. So a big question before us is, should we welcome that or should we want something else to happen? Why won't the population fall a bit and then just stabilize? Michael Geruso: The key number here is two. Without two children in the next generation to replace two parents in the prior generation, the generations will shrink, and that will happen whether the population level is 10 billion or more, or if the population is tiny. I think it could continue to make sense for people's individual lives to decide that something that averages out to about 1.6 kids, like in the U.S. today or 1.4 kids, like in Europe, is the right choice for them. During drought conditions, kangaroos don't breed, but when conditions improve, they start again. Why do you think that people will not start having more children again? Spears: People are unlike kangaroos in that they make decisions in response to their societies, their cultures, their families, their economies. And for centuries, the decisions that people have been making have been moving towards lower and lower birth rates—from a worldwide average of six in 1800 to five and a half in 1900 to five in 1950 and less than half of that now. It's been a long-term trajectory down; it hasn't been just a response to immediate conditions. For that to stop and turn around would be a reversal of a big trend when all of the social and economic and cultural and family reasons that people are having fewer children probably aren't just going to disappear. There are 26 countries where the birth rate has fallen below replacement since 1950 and it has never risen again, even though those countries' populations have grown because of lower infant mortality or immigration. Why does the birth rate stay down? Geruso: Well, everybody has a different theory. Some people talk about contraception, and contraception is super important. But contraception isn't going to explain, for example, why the birth rate in Sweden has declined from 1.9 to 1.4 over the last decade. It wasn't because in 2015 women in Sweden got access to the pill for the first time. We've heard people talk about the decline in marriage. We've heard people talk about a retreat from religion and tradition. But we see birth rates converging to low levels everywhere around the world, in rich places, in poor places, in places where religion is important, in places that are receding from religion, in places where marriage remains nearly universal. Part of the big challenge here is that social scientists, policymakers, researchers don't yet have a very firm grasp on the exact causes. Don't more people mean more environmental harm, more deforestation, more carbon emissions, more sprawl? Spears: Yes, we have big environmental challenges. And it's natural to think that the way to protect the environment is to have fewer humans. What we say in After the Spike is that the idea that depopulation is the way to confront our environmental challenges now doesn't consider the history of how we've made environmental progress. One of the environmental challenges in the 1960s and 1970s was that we were burning leaded gasoline in our vehicles. The way that in the United States it was solved was through the Clean Air Act of 1970 and various amendments that phased out the use of leaded gas. The way that the world solved the problem of ozone depletion was to ban the use of chlorofluorocarbons in the Montreal Protocol. Every time we've made progress against an environmental challenge before, it's been while the population was growing, by addressing the challenge directly. But there is a limited supply of resources. Won't there be more conflict over land or water or nonrenewable resources if there are more people? Spears: We're not advocating for endless population growth generation after generation. What we're proposing is that we should consider whether we should welcome depopulation, remaking the future by default, or if instead it would be better for the world's population to stabilize at some level, perhaps at a level much lower than today's. After the population peaks and begins to decline, which is overwhelmingly the most likely future, if you want a stabilized population someday, then the birth rate would have to rise to go back up, and basically you have the same sort of question to answer, which is, how in that future would we get to an average birth rate of two children for two adults? What are the positive sides of a bigger population? Geruso: At a fundamental level—although we don't always feel it and we don't always recognize it, and then we don't always credit it—other people are good for us. What separates life now from life a couple of hundred years ago—when as many as half of children died before adulthood, when people didn't have basic material security, when extreme poverty was above 80% of the world, as opposed to today, where it's below 15%—is the work, the ideas, the innovation, the progress. What's made that progress so spectacular is that many minds have been at work, sharing knowledge, learning things, and building the progress that we all now get to enjoy. The population decline is predicted to start in about 2080. Won't the people of 2080 begin to see 'Hey, we need more people"? Spears: Right now, in 2025 we don't have all of the answers that we need for the fight against climate change, but we're in a lot better position than we would have been if people hadn't been thinking about it and working on it for decades. The year 2080—or 2084 as the U.N. says—is about six decades from now. Six decades ago, people knew some big-picture facts about climate change. People were starting the scientific research, starting to build a social and political movement to understand that decarbonizing was a good idea. That left us in a better position today to make the decisions and implement the changes that we need to make. We have the option to get started today talking about what sort of future we should try to be building for the next generations, whether we should be trying to make parenting better, fairer, easier, more supported, whether we should welcome depopulation or prefer something else. We can be doing that research, building that sort of social consensus, so that as the decades go on, people are in a better position to deal with the challenges that they'll face. Isn't climate change different because we are dealing with something that we don't exactly know how to solve whereas we do know how to have children? Geruso: I actually think the analogy is quite close, where we could, for a very long time, live in a world where each person's individual decision that makes sense for them might be to continue emitting carbon, might be to continue having smaller families, and they should, in the case of fertility, be free to make those choices. And so we have a big question and a big challenge, which is, how can we build a world in which people who aspire to have more children feel supported, feel able to have those larger families, to choose to have a family in the first place, to choose to have children in the first place? Are there any countries that are over-performing in your terms? And are there qualities of those countries that we could seek to emulate, or is it mostly poverty and the need to have more children? Spears: About two-thirds of people around the world live in a country where the birth rate is below two, meaning about a third of the people live in a country where it isn't. But essentially everywhere, over a long enough horizon, birth rates are falling. So in sub-Saharan Africa, the birth rate now is 4.3, but it was 5 in 2014 and it was 6.4 in 1950, so it's falling there too. The level of secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa for girls was not so different than it was in India a few decades ago, and the birth rate in Africa is not so different than it was in India a few decades ago. The population of Africa is going to keep growing within the 21st century. There are 1.2 billion people living there now. It'll be up to around 3 billion at the end of the century. They're just at a different place on the path to where higher living standards and lower birth rates have tended to go together. So are humans the opposite of kangaroos? When conditions are good, do we stop having as many children instead of when conditions are tough? Spears: Here in the U.S. what we most commonly hear is that people aren't having children because kids just aren't affordable; the price of childcare and housing and college are all so much higher than they used to be. But we don't see richer people within societies having these large families, we see richer countries having lower birth rates on average, and we see a long-term trend, where as countries are experiencing higher living standards, they also tend to be getting lower birth rates. What are the key things that should be done now to stabilize the population? Geruso: Today, I think relatively few people would come into a conversation about low birth rates with the view that other people on the planet make life better for all of us. If we will ever bend humanity's path away from global depopulation, that would need a major investment in reorganization of our economy, of our institutions, of our cultures, to support and prioritize parenting and caregiving. And there's no reason to think that that serious investment is going to happen as long as we're hanging on to these anti-people sentiments. So the first step has to be a broad understanding that we all benefit from living in a big world. That has to come before any policy recommendations. One of the reasons you wrote the book is that you want 'kinder people' to talk about the challenges of depopulation, as well as people who are creating fear about it to push an agenda. It sounds a bit like you think that the right has hijacked the pro-people argument—that you're trying to bring people who consider themselves progressive into the idea that population is good. Geruso: There's a problem where sometimes Democrats, liberals, progressives accept the implicit assumption in the conservative view, which is that if we were to talk about the social value of raising birth rates, then we must be talking about some sort of regression on gender equity and progress for women. The reason why we should reject that assumption is because we shouldn't believe that children are just the responsibility of women. They're the responsibility of all of us. Spears: My research is about India. Part of what we're doing is trying to lift everybody's gaze up a bit to the fact that low birth rates and a future of depopulation is something that's a globally shared situation, that the birth rate in India isn't so different from the birth rate in the United States and that we're all on a shared path together to global depopulation. You're both fathers. How many children do you each have? Geruso: I have one kid—an 11-year-old. Spears: I've got two kiddos. You'll see in the book how that happened.
Boston Globe
29-06-2025
- Boston Globe
Max Fink, champion of electroconvulsive therapy, dies at 102
'Many severely depressed patients are maintained for weeks, for months and even years on antidepressant drugs,' he told a conference on depression in Philadelphia in 1988. 'Are we not unfair when we do this to our patients when ECT remains an active and excellent treatment?' He first witnessed the use of ECT in 1952, on his first day as a neurology and psychiatry resident at Hillside Hospital (now Zucker Hillside Hospital, a part of Northwell) in the New York City borough of Queens. One by one, he watched as five patients — under restraints, with rubber bite-blocks in their mouths and electrodes applied to their temples — received enough electrical current to induce a grand mal seizure. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Observing a full grand mal seizure in each patient jarred me,' he wrote in 2017 in an unpublished memoir for Stony Brook University in New York, where he worked for many years. But over the next few months, he said, 'I had learned that ECT effectively reduced suicide thoughts, relieved negativism, aggression, depressed and manic moods. Of the hospital populations, the patients treated with electroshock improved the most.' Advertisement Although Dr. Fink was convinced of ECT's positive effects, others in the psychiatric profession weren't. Advertisement 'Max was trained in an era when the main theme of psychiatry was orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis,' said Dr. Charles Nemeroff, chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, who collaborated with Dr. Fink on a paper about ECT. 'But he was part of a small group of academic psychiatrists who recognized that severe depression and schizophrenia were brain diseases.' Dr. Fink, author of many scientific articles about ECT and founding editor of the quarterly Convulsive Therapy (now The Journal of ECT), faced opposition from other doctors, Scientologists and protesters at conferences. 'We had a problem getting this accepted by the public, and I was protested at meetings across the United States and Europe,' he said in 2019, when he received an award for lifetime achievement from the Institute of Living, a psychiatric center in Hartford, Connecticut. Some opponents of ECT said it was ineffective or left people with memory loss and trauma. Others described it as a brutal practice, an enduring view reinforced by the 1975 film 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' in which a patient at a psychiatric hospital, played by Jack Nicholson, undergoes ECT without anesthesia as a punishment for his rebelliousness. In his book 'Electroshock: Healing Mental Illness' (1999), Dr. Fink wrote that 'the picture of a pleading patient being dragged to a treatment room, where he is forcibly administered electric currents, as his jaw clenches, his back arches, his body shakes, all the while he is held down by burly attendants, may be dramatic but it is wholly false. Patients aren't coerced into treatment.' Advertisement Critics of Dr. Fink's passionate support of ECT said he downplayed the risks, including memory loss and cognitive impairment. 'One of Fink's books describes going to get ECT as no more significant than going to the dentist, which I thought was pretty glib,' said Jonathan Sadowsky, author of 'Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy' (2017). 'And there are a lot of scientific studies about memory loss from ECT.' Dr. Fink insisted that antidepressants and antipsychotics could cause more damage, including memory loss, than ECT did. Nemeroff — who described Dr. Fink as 'an irascible, dominant figure' as well as 'the world's leader in electroconvulsive therapy' — said Dr. Fink's focus was firmly on the effectiveness of the treatment. 'He was a zealot, no question about it,' Nemeroff said. 'He thought ECT was a panacea.' ECT's effectiveness in treating serious mental illness has been recognized by, among others, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association and the National Institute of Mental Health. But although it is useful for treating serious mental illness, it does not prevent recurrence. Consequently, most people treated with ECT need to continue the procedure or use another type of maintenance treatment. Maximilian Fink was born Jan. 16, 1923, in Vienna. His father, Julius, was a doctor in general practice who was trained in radiology. His mother, Bronislava (Lowenthal) Fink, known as Bronia, left medical school at the University of Vienna after three years; later, in the mid-1950s, she became a social worker. Max and his mother immigrated to the United States in 1924, joining his father there. (His brother, Sidney, who was born in 1927, also became a doctor, specializing in gastroenterology.) Advertisement As a boy, Max developed X-ray film in his father's office. He started college at 16, at New York University's University Heights campus in the Bronx, and graduated in three years, with a bachelor's degree in biology, in 1942. After earning his medical degree at the NYU College of Medicine (now the Grossman School of Medicine) three years later and interning at Morrisania Hospital in the Bronx, he served in the Army from 1946-47, attending the School of Military Neuropsychiatry. After his discharge from the Army, he worked as a surgeon on three passenger ships. From 1948-53, Dr. Fink served as a resident at Montefiore, Bellevue, Hillside and Mount Sinai hospitals. From 1954-62, he ran the division of experimental psychiatry at Hillside. He later served as director of the Missouri Institute of Psychiatry and as a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College. From 1972-97, he was a professor of psychiatry and neurology at Stony Brook University, where he later became a professor emeritus. Dr. Fink's research had unusual breadth. He showed early in his research career that penicillin, still an experimental drug, was better than sulfa for patients with pleural cavity infections. He studied the pharmacology of LSD, marijuana and opioids; used electroencephalograms, or EEG tests, to measure the changes caused by electroshock, insulin coma and psychoactive drugs; and wrote about the effects of changing the placements of electrodes in ECT. He was also among the scholars who successfully argued for the recognition of catatonia — a syndrome characterized by irregular movements and immobility — by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, as separate from schizophrenia. Advertisement Dr. Fink's other books include 'Convulsive Therapy: Theory and Practice' (1979), 'Electroshock: Restoring the Mind' (1999), 'Ethics in Electroconvulsive Therapy' (2004, with Jan-Otto Ottosson) and 'The Madness of Fear: A History of Catatonia' (2018, with Edward Shorter). He wrote or collaborated on about 800 scientific papers, including one on catatonia that was accepted for publication by Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry shortly before his death. In addition to his son, Dr. Fink is survived by two daughters, Rachel and Linda, and four grandchildren. His wife, Martha (Gross) Fink, died in 2016. In a 2018 interview for Stony Brook, Dr. Fink reflected on his career and its influence. 'I think I was very lucky,' he said. 'However I worked it out, I was always able to find projects and kept busy.' He later added: 'We've saved lives knowingly. It's been a very interesting life.' This article originally appeared in
Business Insider
15-06-2025
- Business Insider
The next wearable tech could be a face 'tattoo' that measures mental stress
Tattoos can reveal a lot about a person. One day, they could even reveal a person's brain waves. At least, that's the goal for researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. "This tattoo is not like a normal tattoo," Nanshu Lu, a professor in the university's Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, told Business Insider. Lu worked alongside engineering professor Luis Sentis and others to develop an ultra-thin, wireless wearable device that she compared to a temporary tattoo sticker. The non-invasive device, applied to the skin with an adhesive, measures brain activity and eye movement to gauge an individual's mental workload. Lu said the device is intended for people working in high-stakes or high-demand jobs, such as aircraft pilots, air traffic controllers, drone operators, and robot teleoperators. These jobs could be considered high-stress since they require focus, quick-thinking skills, and a small margin for error. "Technology is developing much faster than human evolution, so it is very hard to keep up with the technological demand in modern jobs," she said. "Therefore, it's very important not to overload the operator because not only would that jeopardize the outcome of the mission, it would also harm their health." Although the idea of an electronic tattoo might sound like something out of a sci-fi novel, humans and technology have been melding for a while. Nearly 40 years ago, for example, the first fully digital hearing aid became available to the public, according to the Hearing Health Foundation. And now, Elon Musk is embedding computer chips into people's brains through his company, Neuralink. Recent wearable tech inventions include smartwatches, Bluetooth headphones, VR headsets, and fitness trackers, to name a few. Some health-conscious folks invest in wearable technology like the Oura Ring, which collects data on everything from sleep activity to body temperature. However, those devices don't analyze brain activity and eye movement. "Over the years, we developed a series of non-invasive skin conformable e-tattoos to measure cardiovascular health, then measure the mental stress from the palm sweating," Lu said of previous devices she helped develop. "Now, finally, we move on to the brainwave." Lu said the device certainly isn't the first or only EEG sensor on the market, but it's smaller and lighter than previous models. Conducting an EEG test typically requires attaching electrodes to an individual's full scalp with a gel or paste to collect data, which can be time-consuming. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are attempting to streamline that process by proving mental workload can be measured only from the forehead. During lab tests, participants did memorization drills that involved a screen with flashing boxes. "In the past, there was no way to objectively assess mental workload. The subjects have to finish the test and then a questionnaire," Lu said. "But in the future, if we can implement some lightweight machine learning model directly on a microprocessor in the Bluetooth chip on e-tattoo, then yes, our goal is to one day be able to do it in real time." A report by Grand View Research said that the global wearable technology market was worth $84.2 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $186.14 billion by 2030, underscoring consumers' willingness to integrate technology into their everyday lives. However, electronic tattoos won't be commercial anytime soon. Lu and her fellow researchers are still conducting tests on and developing the tech. Still, she can imagine a world where the e-tattoo is used by people not employed in high-stakes jobs. It could be used by "people who would like to focus as well as people who want to meditate to see if they are truly relaxed," Lu said.
