Rates of poor mental health are increasing in Japan, with young Japanese people recording worryingly low levels of well-being, says Seiji Kumagai a professor at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Future of Human Society in Japan. “The self-esteem of younger generations in Japan is the lowest out of all developed countries,” he notes, citing data from a recent report by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.
Kumagai believes there are a few innovative strategies that could improve people’s overall mental well-being. One is to develop technologies to better understand the nuances of someone’s ongoing mental state, and another is to figure out how to nudge that state in a more positive direction.
Kumagai is the Program Director (PD) of the Moonshot Goal 9 initiative, aimed at the ‘Realization of a mentally healthy and dynamic society by increasing peace of mind and vitality by 2050’. This program is one of the Moonshot Goals supported by Japan’s Cabinet Office and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
The effort is part of a wider initiative — the Moonshot Research and Development Program — which was launched by the Japanese government in 2019 to tackle the country’s most pressing problems, including climate change, an aging population and poor mental health.
Assessing mental states
One problem with assessing mental health today is that people are typically required to assess their own mental states, Kumagai explains. For instance, they may be asked to fill out a questionnaire that asks them to rank how happy or irritable they feel on a scale of one to 10. “But people sometimes find it hard to assess how they’re thinking or feeling,” he says.
Kumagai and other researchers of the Moonshot Goal 9 are working on more objective ways to measure an individual’s mental state. These include software that analyses facial expressions, functional MRI to track brain blood flow, and electroencephalograms (EEG) to measure electrical signaling in the brain.
For example, one of the Moonshot Goal 9’s project managers and Osaka University engineer, Toru Nakamura, and his team, are developing machine learning models to assess emotional states using wearable health monitoring tech, such as smart watches and rings. These can collect real-time, continuous data — including information on a person’s voice, physical activity and sleep.
Nakamura has been able to find a correlation between mental states, such as anxiety or a positive mood, and the amount of physical activity a person engages in.
He says in the real world this method has proven to be highly accurate in predicting mental states, and is on par with, or even surpasses, the results obtained from physical activity data taken in laboratory settings. He is also working on identifying more nuanced states — such as ‘vigorous’, ‘gloomy’ or ‘concerned’ — based on a combination of tone of voice and physical activity data1.
Tracking this type of data could not only help people receive the appropriate diagnosis, but it could also help mental health professionals intervene earlier. “By accurately capturing mental and physical discomfort over time, we believe it is possible to intervene before the onset of more severe mental illness,” explains Kumagai.
Enabling transitions
The next step in the program is to find ways to transition negative mental states to more positive ones, says Kumagai. He admits this is easier said than done: “When I get angry or irritated, I’d like to be able to pacify those emotions, but I know it can be very difficult.”
A number of Moonshot Goal 9 researchers are studying mouse models to understand the neural-circuitry involved in pathways that control emotions and desires — as well as how to modulate them.
Neuroscientist, Katsuhiko Miyazaki at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, for example, is examining how the serotonin neural network — which plays a key role in regulating mood, impulse control, and social behaviour — can be tweaked using light technologies to control how long mice are willing to wait before receiving a food reward during experiments2.
“We hypothesize that serotonin works to regulate patience, in other words, increasing or decreasing a willingness to wait for a future reward,” explains Kumagai.
In his animal trials, Miyazaki uses a revolutionary biological technique called optogenetics, which employs light, genetic manipulation and light sensitive proteins to precisely control neuronal activity. Optogenetics, however, is considered to be too invasive for use in humans, which means researchers will have to look for a more benign way to tweak activity in the human brain’s serotonin networks.
Strong social fabric
Another part of the Moonshot Goal 9 mission focuses on ways to improve community connections, in recognition that strong social relationships are also vital to mental well-being.
Neuroscientist, Ken-Ichiro Tsutsui from Tohoku University, and his team, for instance, are designing a translator of emotions. It is targeted at people on the autism spectrum, who may have trouble discerning and expressing emotions. The technology comprises two parts: an ‘interpreter’ that deduces another person’s mental state from EEG data, tone of voice, and other cues; and an ‘expressor’ that conveys this state to the user via virtual/augmented reality or a robotics system.
Kumagai — who has written extensively about Buddhism and Bon, the indigenous religion of Tibet — is keen to combine neuroscience with traditional knowledge, the social sciences, and the arts in this project.
The teams call their work ‘kokoro-tech’, meaning technology that includes the ideas of the mind, wisdom and aspiration, and they have recently created a set of guidelines for its use.
Kumagai and his collaborators are also working to develop indicators that will help measure how effective each Moonshot Goal 9 technology is at supporting long-term psychological health. These indicators will provide scientific yardsticks to test whether the technologies are producing reproducible and reliable results in aid of mental well-being.
The Moonshot Goal 9 teams are currently figuring out which indicators — which may include concepts such as ‘reciprocal altruism’ and ‘resilience’ — might be most relevant to their projects and are conducting feasibility tests on measuring these. By 2027, a set of markers will be developed.
Early in 2025, the program will reach its third-year mark and start to move beyond the theoretical and into the real-world. “We hope to do some pilot studies, for example, with wearable sensors, in small cities,” says Kumagai.
“By 2050, we aim to foster a thriving community where individuals experience peace of mind, mental clarity, and a deep sense of purpose,” he adds. And the researchers hope the technologies will find applications in many other parts of the world too.