Introducing Experience Studies
We want to help young people better learn to recognise the various forces and pressures shaping their experience of life, this awareness helping learn to better respond with clarity and discernment, over time, building the capacity for resilience & protecting agency. We are bringing this missing layer into education as a new subject, ‘Experience Studies’.
Gearing Up the Mind for a Changing World
Technology is changing how we learn, relate to others and understand ourselves. Young people need opportunities to explore how these influences affect their attention, emotions and decisions.
IMCE is working to bring this understanding into education and public life through Experience Studies—an emerging field exploring how human experience takes shape and how we participate in it.
Through this work, we aim to nurture the capacities, perspectives and practical skills people need to navigate life and remain self-directed in a world increasingly shaped by adaptive and generative technologies that can influence us through seemingly personal relationships.
One Part of a Joined-Up Response
The challenge can only be met in three places: in our environment itself, in how we protect our attention, and in how we develop our understanding of our environment, its forces and influences, indeed the general nature of experience. IMCE focuses on this area to the right. There is great work being done in the first two areas, but in training the mind to resist and ‘rise above’ the influence and effects of adaptive and relational systems, this is where we focus.
Improve the Mind’s Environment
Collectively working to moderate the behaviour of the forces of influence.
Challenge systems and incentives, constraining business, and working to limit systemic extraction and exploitation.
Better Guard the Gates of the Mind
Disernment & discipline in the quality of what is brought to one’s attention.
Reducing exposure to digital media generally and specifically short-form, creating boundaries, limits.
Clarify Perception & Widen Perspective
Awareness of attention, motives behind actions, reactions & default responds.
Developing awareness, steadiness of mind, emotional resilience, and general ‘system’ coherence.
Our Work
Research & Strategy
We investigate the changing conditions shaping the modern mind, identify emerging pressures & the human capacities they affect, and develop strategies for an effective educational response.
Education Design
We translate research & emerging insights into frameworks, learning approaches, exercises & tools that develop understanding of human experience and strengthen awareness, discernment & agency.
What is Experience Studies?
Experience Studies explores how human experience takes shape, what influences it and how we participate in its unfolding. Drawing on psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and other fields, IMCE is developing this field to examine the relationships between body and mind, attention, perception, emotion, thought, identity and the wider conditions of our lives.
Introducing Psynapp
Psynapp is IMCE’s framework for turning these insights into practice, bringing conceptual exploration together with direct observation, enquiry and practice. Simple and integrative, it recognises the layered, emergent nature of reality, the dualities we encounter and the embodied nature of experience.
Through awareness, critical thinking and discernment, Psynapp supports clearer thinking, healthier cognitive alignment and greater resilience. Its aim is to help us preserve mental energy, strengthen agency and protect our capacity for depth in human experience.