Brain Health Meets Flourishing

Baylor’s Institute for Global Human Flourishing has partnered with the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas to study how brain health and human flourishing relate, two fields that have largely developed side by side. The partnership starts from a simple proposal: flourishing describes whether a life is going well as a whole, while brain health offers measurable cognitive, emotional, and social capacities that people can strengthen to get there.

The two also reinforce each other. Healthy brain function supports what flourishing depends on: reflecting on one’s own life, regulating emotions, building relationships, and following through on goals. In turn, the core elements of a flourishing life, such as purpose, close relationships, and meaningful engagement, are associated with better cognitive and emotional health.

That two-way link is what makes brain health so useful as a starting point. Research from the Center for BrainHealth shows that people of all ages and starting points can improve their BrainHealth Index scores, with greater engagement bringing greater gains. If brain health and flourishing move together, brain health gives people a concrete place to start.

The first project will put that idea to the test by bringing together the two institutions’ measurement tools. Researchers will match items from the Center’s BrainHealth Index to the Secure Flourishing Index used in the Global Flourishing Study, producing a proxy flourishing score from the Center’s existing longitudinal data. That will let them see whether gains in brain health track with gains in flourishing over time.

The teams lay out the thinking behind the collaboration in a joint white paper by Byron Johnson, Sarah A. Laane, Matthew Lee, Olivia Nail-Beatty, and Andrew S. Nevin.