Human cognition and mental health do not arise from the brain alone, but from continuous interactions among people, bodies, and social environments. This talk introduces a multi-brain perspective on neuroscience that connects research on consciousness with new directions in psychiatry. Using recent advances that enable multiple brains to be recorded simultaneously, we explore how everyday social interactions, such as conversation, cooperation, and shared attention, give rise to coordinated patterns of brain activity across individuals. These patterns reflect how people align emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally during real-world interactions.
Building on these insights, the talk argues for a shift in how we think about mental health. Rather than focusing solely on what happens inside an individual’s brain, we propose an embodied and relational view in which well-being and vulnerability depend on the quality of interactions with others. Changes in how brains coordinate during social exchanges have been linked to a range of psychiatric conditions, suggesting that mental health is shaped by relationships as much as by biology. Inter-personalized psychiatry extends this idea by considering diagnosis and intervention at the level of pairs, families, and groups, integrating brain mechanisms with lived social experience.
Overall, this work highlights how studying brains in interaction can deepen our understanding of consciousness, inform more socially grounded approaches to mental health, and open new paths for clinical research and practice.