Thank you.
I think the best way to think about it is that you have risk factors and interventions, and then you have outcomes and results. There are many risk factors and interventions, but I like to boil it down into three categories: first, the biological stuff, which is nutrition, immunization, toxins, etc.; second, the cognitive stimulation, actually singing, playing, and reading to children, and also treating maternal depression, so the parent interacts with the child; and third, the conflict, abuse, and neglect.
Those are the three categories of the interventions and risk factors. I think we have to stay agnostic, because you'll get different risk factors in different jurisdictions. Being well nourished doesn't help, if you're a child soldier. One of the real niches of the saving brains initiative is that we are really the only global program that's agnostic to risk factors.
On the other side, you have the results. There you have the cognitive measure you referred to, which is mostly the child's ability to regulate herself, because it's a frontal lobe phenomenon. It's not purely intelligence, and that's why any of those risk factors, when you deal with them or when you protect a child's brain during that critical period, from the key risk factors that are operating, lead to better social soft skills in business, more self-regulation, which prevents criminality, and the evidence also shows that those risk factors lead to depression and non-communicable disease.
I think the fantastic thing, though, is that the very same simple innovations and interventions in those risk factors, that save lives during that critical period—that's the focus of Canada's leadership—also save brains. That's why I talk about it as the double dividend. We really simply need to account for that huge benefit. I think the effect of those risk factors is in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, actually, on the world economy. We simply don't have an accounting for it yet, but we're working on that at Grand Challenges Canada.