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Today is a day of gratitude.
Gratitude for the courage, strength, and selflessness of the men and women who serve. Gratitude for the families who support them. And gratitude for something we talk about far less: what veterans have taught us about the human brain. At Neurable, we spend our days thinking about the brain. But on Veterans Day, we’re reminded that some of the most important insights in modern neuroscience have been shaped by the experiences of those who’ve worn the uniform. Their service has not only protected our country but has also expanded the frontiers of science, helping pave a better path for brain health care for athletes, first responders, and more.
The Invisible Burdens That Demand Our Action
Even as we express our deepest gratitude to those who’ve served, we also acknowledge the unseen challenges many carry, challenges that often start long before they become veterans.
The numbers tell a stark story:
- Since 2000, more than 430,000 documented traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) have occurred among U.S. service members, most of them mild yet still capable of producing long-term cognitive or emotional strain (Defense Health Agency, 2024).
- 10–23% of post-9/11 veterans experience PTSD, which is associated with nearly twice the risk of dementia later in life (National Center for PTSD, 2023; Yaffe et al., 2010).
- Add to this the weight of operational stress, disrupted sleep, and repetitive blast exposure, and it becomes clear: brain health and wellness requires attention from a service member’s first day in uniform (Huber et al., 2023).
- Even mild TBIs (mTBIs) can include long-tail consequences when paired with chronic stress or poor sleep (VA & DoW, 2021).
- Early detection improves outcomes. Among veterans treated for TBI, 85% have at least one co-occurring psychiatric diagnosis (Taylor et al., 2012).
These realities remind us that service members and veterans deserve early, comprehensive, lifelong support for the health of their minds. Not as an afterthought, but as a strategic imperative.
What Military Service Has Taught Us About the Brain
Military service pushes humans to cognitive and emotional extremes: sustained attention, rapid decision-making, complex coordination under pressure, and constant transitions between high-stress and recovery cycles. This alone has taught researchers volumes about the brain’s capacity for adaptation.
Over the last two decades, we’ve also learned something else: many brain-related challenges aren’t always the dramatic moments. They’re subtle, cumulative, and detectable long before a crisis.
By listening to veterans and studying their experiences, clinicians and scientists have developed better care pathways, stronger screening tools, and a deeper understanding of long-term brain health. And now these insights are reshaping how we support everyone.
Four Principles Veterans Validated for Brain Science
Veterans have helped validate some of the most important principles in brain science today:
1. Early signs matter
Subtle changes – reaction time shifts, attention lapses, sleep disruption, irritability – often appear long before clinically significant symptoms (McKee et al., 2023). These have cognitive underpinnings, which if caught early allow for better intervention, like a “check-engine light.”
2. Longitudinal monitoring is more powerful than single snapshots
Every brain has a unique story to tell. However, when it comes to brain trauma, methods largely rely on small windows of data. It’s as if a doctor were to open up to a random page of someone’s story, read a sentence or two, and then try to make a determination of what’s going on without any context of what happened before or what will happen after. We believe that EEG monitoring over extended periods may reveal cognitive dynamic changes that occur before downstream symptoms appear, offering an even earlier window of detection and course correction.
3. Personalized care leads to better outcomes
The updated VA/DoW Clinical Practice Guideline for mild TBI emphasizes individualized, symptom-guided rehabilitation, an approach rooted in evidence gathered from service members recovering from injury (VA & DoW, 2021). One-size-fits-all doesn’t work for the brain.
4. Resilience is both psychological and physiological
Decades of military training and research have shown how neuroplasticity, structured routines, and recovery support cognitive endurance (Lieberman et al., 2005). Resilience isn’t just a mindset – it’s measurable, trainable, and protective.
These insights are now influencing how we think about brain health for students, athletes, high-demand professionals, and aging populations. Veterans didn’t just highlight the problems. They’re helping to build the solutions.
How Innovation Builds on the Legacy of Their Service
Neurable’s mission to make brain health measurable, accessible, and actionable rests on the decades of military-led research and the veterans who made it possible.
The reason we can measure cognitive strain or detect early attention shifts today is because service members shared their data, their stories, and their recovery journeys. Longitudinal monitoring is becoming a reality because military research proved it works.
Their service didn’t just protect the country. It’s catalyzing modern neuroscience.
A Call to Action
For defense leaders:
Continue advancing the Warfighter Brain Health vision – prioritizing early detection, cognitive readiness, and personalized monitoring from day one of service through transition to civilian life.
For innovators and investors:
Accelerate privacy-first, real-world-ready technologies that translate research into everyday support for veterans and civilians alike. Solutions need to enable operators to continue doing their jobs while enhancing overall longevity and healthspan.
For society:
Recognize that veterans didn’t just highlight the need for better brain health. They helped build the roadmap. Supporting veteran brain health isn’t charity – it’s investing in knowledge that benefits everyone.
Thank You for Your Service, and for What You’ve Taught Us
On this Veterans Day, we honor the sacrifices veterans have made, the resilience they’ve shown, and the strength they continue to embody.
Veterans helped the world understand the brain in ways we never could have otherwise. Their legacy is one of service, science, and human progress.
We specifically would like to highlight the great work at some of the institutions and groups working tirelessly to affect active-duty and veteran outcomes:
- HomeBase
- National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICOE)
- United States Brain Injury Alliance (USBTA)
- Center for Brain Health, UT Dallas
- Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC)
- Uniformed Services University (USU) & the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine (Academic/Research)
- DARPA – Biological Technologies Office (BTO)
And many more.
From all of us at Neurable:
Thank you for your service.
Thank you for your strength.
And thank you for shaping a future where brain health is proactive, personalized, and possible for everyone.
A Note About Neurable
Neurable is an American neurotechnology company working to change humanity’s relationship with the brain. Our systems and tools affect the board room all the way to the war room. Neurable technology enables access to the most important organ, allowing us to make better decisions to inform our own wellbeing. Neurable is proud to serve American active-duty members and injured soldiers in Ukraine, working hard to ensure the wellbeing of service members as they sacrifice themselves for the good of our nation and allies.
Works Cited
Alosco, M. L., Mez, J., Tripodis, Y., et al. (2023). Repetitive head impacts and early neuroinflammation in young athletes. JAMA Neurology, 80(2), 200–209.
Broglio, S. P., McCrea, M., McAllister, T., et al. (2022). The NCAA–DoW CARE Consortium: 10-year summary of findings. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 56(2), 79–89.
Defense Health Agency. (2024). Traumatic brain injury: DoW statistics and reporting. Department of Defense.
Greenberg, S. M., et al. (2022). Post-traumatic stress disorder and dementia risk in veterans. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 18(4), 765–774.
Huber, J., et al. (2023). White matter microstructural changes after repeated blast exposure. Neurology, 100(5), e532–e543.
Lieberman, H. R., Tharion, W. J., Shukitt-Hale, B., et al. (2005). Sustaining cognitive performance during military operations. Nutrition Reviews, 63(12), S258–S265.
McKee, A. C., Stein, T. D., Kiernan, P. T., et al. (2023). Early cognitive and behavioral changes linked to repetitive brain stress. Acta Neuropathologica, 145(1), 1–18.
Meabon, J. S., Huber, B. R., Cross, D. J., et al. (2016). Repetitive blast exposure and white matter abnormalities in veterans. NeuroImage: Clinical, 12, 241–253.
National Center for PTSD. (2023). PTSD in Veterans: Epidemiology. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Peters, M. E., Yaffe, K., & Gupta, N. (2023). Blood-based biomarkers for early brain injury detection in veterans. The Lancet Neurology, 22(3), 250–262.
Taylor, B. C., Hagel, E. M., Carlson, K. F., et al. (2012). Psychiatric comorbidity among veterans with TBI. Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 27(1), E1–E12.
VA & DoW. (2021). VA/DoW Clinical Practice Guideline for the Management of Concussion-mTBI. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense.
Yaffe, K., Vittinghoff, E., Lindquist, K., et al. (2010). Posttraumatic stress disorder and risk of dementia among U.S. veterans. Archives of General Psychiatry, 67(6), 608–613.
2 Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.
Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.
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