A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.
The modern world is at odds with living our best lives. But it’s possible to change, to build resilience, to improve mental health. Brain science shows the way.
The overstimulation of modern life has led to burnout, disconnection, and a mental health reckoning at work and at home. How do we reclaim our humanity from systems that don’t serve it, to lead healthier and happier lives? Rachel Barr is a playful and bracingly real science communicator—an online phenom whose “Rachel the Neuroscientist” videos demystify the principles of brain science, empowering her over two million online followers (TikTok, etc.) to make informed decisions about their mental health. In practical, heartfelt keynotes, she moves us beyond self-help sloganeering and the rot of “optimization” culture to help us reclaim attention, identity, compassion, delight, and genuine connection. Because of the brain’s near-infinite potential for neuroplastic change, she shows, it’s never too late to carve out neural pathways to form new habits, new skills, and new ways of thinking.
Rachel Barr has a Master’s in molecular neuroscience and is completing a PhD, which explores the electrophysiology of memory formation during sleep. In all her work, she offers a unique blend of neuroscience (and psychology, behavioural science, philosophy) with cultural critique. Her hotly-anticipated book, How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend (Random House 2025) is a delight-filled, evidence-based guide to taking better care of your brain—so it, in turn, will take better care of you. It was inspired by Rachel’s struggles through years of devastating loss, heartache, and uncertainty until neuroscience gave her the first spark of self-belief she had felt in her adult life.
On top of her research and writing, Rachel has spent the past half decade as an in-demand behavioral science consultant, working with Fortune 500 companies to better align human minds and behavior—for example, helping them to attract talent, fix internal HR and employee concerns, even design and market UX/US apps and websites.
In delightful, highly customizable keynotes, buoyed by good-humor, relatable storytelling, and science-backed studies, Rachel Barr examines a variety of topics that help us rethink productivity and mental health as natural human capacities distorted by modern life. She then equips you with tangible strategies to live and work more fully, with more presence, connection, and compassion.
Obsessed with happiness as a long-term goal, we tend to overlook the small, fleeting experiences that keep us going. In this talk, Rachel Barr discusses delight as a vital neurological counterweight to stress and burnout—how it actually changes the brain, enhances resilience, and restores perspective. How, then, do we manufacture delight, something that tends to be spontaneous?
We’re drowning in information but starving for meaning, and our brains are paying the price. What does constant digital stimulation do to memory, attention, and emotion regulation? By separating fearmongering from neuroscience, Rachel helps audiences see why fake news spreads faster than truth, why we’re so cognitively exhausted, and how to build a brain-buffering toolkit for the modern information landscape. Audiences leave with strategies to restore attention, improve their mood, and create conditions for actual sustained thinking again.
Why does loneliness seem to make itself worse? Because it rewires the brain in ways that make social connection feel harder. In this timely talk, Rachel Barr shows how chronic disconnection distorts perception, triggers threat responses, and impairs trust. Using research-backed strategies for reopening the social brain, she helps audiences see how it’s possible to rebuild curiosity about others, and shift from fear to reciprocity. This is a powerful talk for anyone navigating remote work, burnout, or post-pandemic relationship repair, especially teams and leaders trying to restore connection at scale.
