Measuring Neural Health: An Energetic Signature of the Living Brain

Quantifying neural health before irreversible decline occurs remains one of the central challenges in neuroscience and medicine. Across epilepsy, psychiatric illness, neurodevelopmental disorders, and neurodegeneration, we lack a unifying physiological standard that defines what a “healthy brain” truly is - and how it begins to fail.

This talk will introduce the Neural Health Index (NHI), a physics-grounded biomarker built on two organizing principles of living neural systems: entropy maximization in spatial energy distributions and tight homeostatic regulation of neural activity. In a healthy resting brain, energy is broadly and efficiently distributed across regions, reflecting high entropy, while remaining remarkably stable and tightly controlled.

NHI operationalizes neural health through five measurable energetic properties: lognormal energy distributions, balanced regional allocation, statistical independence between regions, low variance, and temporal stability. Prof Sarma will present results from multimodal EEG, fMRI, and MEG datasets comprising over 800 participants across neurological, psychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative conditions.…