Decade of the Mind

The Decade of the Mind Project is an international initiative to advance scientific understanding of how the mind and complex behaviors are related to the activity of human brains. The problem of explaining the mind is so complex as to require "big science" to make real progress. The effort stemmed from concerns in the scientific community that mind research (as opposed to simply brain research) had received inadequate support relative to its importance in human lives. The Project began with a conference of leading US scientists at George Mason University in May 2007 which led to The Decade of the Mind Manifesto, published as a letter to the editor in Science. The Manifesto called for a new $4B US investment in research across the many disciplines of mind research over the decade from 2012 to 2022. Since the May 2007 meeting, the Decade of the Mind Project has held several other conferences across the United States and has been internationalised with a conference in Berlin, Germany, in September 2009 and a conference in Singapore in October 2010. The conference in Berlin, Germany, organised by Professor Manfred Spitzer, focused on the impact of this project on education, where they reported that this project could see improved educational outcomes, particularly in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Around a year after this, they held a conference in Singapore in October 2010, organised by the Singapore Ministry of Defence, which was centred on the concept of applying the knowledge of human minds to both machines and the augmented cognition for human beings.