Neuroscience Has a Race Problem
In 2017, Jasmine Kwasa had family in town, and they wanted to see the lab where she spent so many of her hours. Kwasa was three years into her Ph.D. program at Boston University, studying how people with ADHD process sound. To monitor the brains of her subjects, she used electroencephalography (EEG), which relies on a snug-fitting electrode cap or individual electrodes pasted onto the scalp to record electric signals emanating from active neurons.
When Kwasa was showing her mom and cousin around the lab, her cousin asked if she could try out the EEG machine to see what her own brain waves looked like. Kwasa dismissed the idea out of hand. The EEG wouldn’t work well with her cousin’s hair type, she told her.
Biases are baked into neuroimaging technologies.
“My mom and cousin were horrified,” Kwasa says. It was only then that she realized EEG’s limited functionality with thick curly, kinky, and textured hair types—and her knee jerk response—might be a real problem, a source of exclusion in the field.
Kwasa, now a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute, soon began working on a way to address the bias—, named for the Haitian-Creole word for brain. Originally invented by an undergraduate research assistant at the
