For professors, knowing whether a teaching strategy is working on their students is invaluable. Knowing how their brains are reacting to the information they are presenting them could revolutionize education.

“Through neuroscience and immersive technologies, we can analyze what is happening to people when they interact with different resources in the lab,” said Manuel Cebral, research professor at the School of Humanities and Education (EHE), Campus Monterrey, and founder of the Neurohumanities Lab.

During the panel Neurohumanities Laboratory: Experiences and Learnings panel, Cebral, Mauricio Ramírez and Alejandra Ruíz presented the most recent advances in this space as part of the activities of the IFE Conference 2025.

The lab emerged as a place where literature, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI) and immersive technologies converge to lead innovation in education and promote human flourishing.

The location integrates biometric devices, such as eye movement trackers or facial recognition systems, motion tracking technologies, such as infrared or thermal cameras, and high-capacity computers to evaluate people’s reaction to different stimuli in real time.

The scans can then be converted into databases and measurements to offer evidence-based feedback to teachers. Depending on the type of data being analyzed, they will be processed with different kinds of algorithms and softwares.

“Part of the project includes technologies that we have developed ourselves,” said Cebral.

The Neurohumanities Lab is an immersive and interactive multidisciplinary and multi-institutional space, created by researchers from Tec de Monterrey, the Autonomous University of Querétaro (UAQ) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Detecting Emotions to Improve Student’s Learning

Although the space has been operating for a relatively short time –since 2019– the team has managed to develop original technologies and publish research papers in journals specializing in educational innovation and other disciplines.

An example of these creations is their measurement helmet which allows the real-time reading of an individual’s brain signals in a given environment.

“The idea was to create a device that the students could use in the classroom, so we needed it to be non-intrusive,” said Ramírez, research professor at the School of Engineering and Sciences (EIC), Monterrey Campus, and member of the Neurohumanities Lab.

The device works with metal sensors that are connected to a computer and allow researchers to perform an electroencephalogram (EEG): an examination that measures the electrical activity of the brain.

It was tested with students to monitor their emotions during the learning process of humanistic subjects, such as philosophy or literature.

The emotions it recognized and classified were admiration, love, hate, desire, joy and sadness, based on measurements of brain activity excitation and other parameters.

What they found is that the helmet system –which includes software and analysis algorithms– had a 94% accuracy in detecting emotions, which is higher than the 88% reported in the literature.

In the future, this information could help teachers monitor how their students are feeling in real time so they can modify the class accordingly and boost their learning.

For the researchers, the best thing about the project is the fact that the helmet was developed with the help of the students.

“One of our pupil built his own 3D printer and put together the helmet with different colors,” Ramirez explained. “We have undergraduate and graduate students with whom we do robust research, not just crazy things that we want to explore.”

Immersive Technologies for Innovating Education

In collaboration with the Experiencial Classroom, a space from the IFE Living Lab, the Neurohumanities Lab is working to generate interdisciplinary research that can be used to provide evidence-based feedback to specific lectures or contexts.

One example was a project with students who were learning how to become entrepreneurs. What they did was use a simpler EEG device to measure their brain activity during a pitch.

“It allowed us to determine when the student felt most overwhelmed, whether it was when they had to share the business need or when they revealed how much it would cost,” said Ruiz, coordinator of experimental research at the IFE Living Lab.

With the information provided by the analysis, teachers could give them specific recommendations on the type of skills they needed to work on.

These are just some of the ways in which the information collected by the Neurohumanities Lab can be applied. It can also be used to advise video game and app developers or health personnel who need to use specific technologies as part of their practice.

Extended reality technologies like the one they develop in the lab can also be used for therapeutic purposes in patients with post-traumatic stress, depression or phobias.

“By measuring things like body temperature or sweating, we obtain data that gives us information about their physiological and mental state,” Ramírez said.

According to Cebral, in their lab, humanities and new technologies play an important role in enhancing the learning process of all types of students.

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