Market Mind | Pushing the frontiers of how we understand markets and the minds they embody.

Welcome to the site of the Market Mind Hypothesis (MMH), a novel economic theory that pushes the frontiers of how we understand markets and the minds they embody. Drawing on the reflections of Adam Smith and other leading thinkers, and informed by modern 4E cognitive science, it is being further developed within an international academic research programme. Our work touches on key issues in economics, investing, and policymaking. We believe our multidisciplinary approach leads to insights that can improve markets, make investing more sustainable, increase the effectiveness of policymaking and ultimately benefit society. We like to think of this as New Economic Enlightenment.

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Cover image by Hybert Design.

Central to the financial sector

What if the market, instead of simply aggregating individual minds, creates and gathers into existence a collective mind, including extended consciousness? Less farfetched than it sounds, this has always casually been referred to by investors as “the market’s mind”. Moreover, what does this mean, especially for mainstream economics and its flawed mechanical worldview? The latter not only perceives, but also treats, the economy as machine, the market as an automaton, and us as robots. Notice that this ignores consciousness, essential to our mentality. The implications of the MMH could be profound, similar to historic paradigm shifts.

In practical terms, with the MMH as a guide we may be better able to identify when things go awry, and avoid some of the excesses—both bubbles and crashes—that have occurred over the years. Likewise, the MMH can guide individual actors to better interpret the information they are getting, and thus improve their decisions. This is beneficial to companies in the financial sector—including banks, investment firms, insurers, and pension funds—as well as policymakers and regulators.

Multidisciplinary

The best theories often come from combining different but complementary approaches. Our subject matter—partnering cognitive science with economics—raises important issues in how markets can and should operate, and how our understanding of mentality (in all its forms) relates to market activity. It also aims to help answer age-old questions such as the relationship between the realm of ideas and the physical world.

MMH spearheading New Economic Enlightenment

New Economic Enlightenment is the true reincarnation of the interconnected intellectual fellowships of the Scottish Enlightenment, centred around Adam Smith, that reshaped society’s economic thinking across the world. Smith was a renowned philosopher and economist, but his theories have frequently been misunderstood and shoehorned into rigid and partisan market doctrine, eschewing his complex and nuanced cognitive and moral theories. We believe he is not only the father of economics but also the first cognitive economist, with theories as relevant and as pertinent now as they were centuries ago. Our work is also inspired by the cognitive reflections of other economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight, and Georg Simmel. In partnership with a growing group of enlightened partners from academia, business, and public policy we’re proud to build on their pioneering thinking. A key aim is to recruit and educate future generations of thought and industry leaders.

Collaboration and Support

In contrast to the current obsession with quick and easy answers (e.g. via black-box AI), we are convinced that raising difficult questions (e.g. via open discourse) is more important. We believe that our search for answers to those questions is central to the health of the economic system, including the proper operation of the finance industry and markets.

To achieve this, our activities include doing research, organising events, teaching our course, and creating practical MMH applications and tools.

We’re inviting scholars, executives and politicians—both junior and senior—to join us in our quest and welcome patrons to fund this exciting endeavour.

All our activities are initiated and organised via the Market Mind Foundation (MMF), an educational charity (SC053694). With support from generous donations from our patrons we hope, in due time, to become fully self-funded.

For more information contact: marketmind@ed.ac.uk

About Us

Our Story

Our programme continues to gather pace, build on a series of published and future publications, as well as research projects (see ‘Research‘). Research includes:

Our pilot project received a research award from the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) in 2019. The paper summarising this project, called “Spontaneous Volatility: Fooled by Reflexive Randomness”, was published by the Journal of Behavioral Finance in June, 2020.

In 2024, Founder-Director Patrick Schotanus established the Market Mind Foundation (MMF), a bespoke educational charity. The MMF acts as the corporate vehicle, including endowment, for all MMH-related activities.

Patrick Schotanus

Dr. Patrick Schotanus is the Founder-Director of the MMF. With a growing group of (international) collaborators and other partners he is further developing his Market Mind Hypothesis (MMH). In 2023 he published the book that introduces the MMH. His technical papers have been published in various peer-reviewed journals and he regularly presents his work at conferences, seminars, and other events.

Previously Patrick worked in investment management and banking in Edinburgh, London, New York, and Singapore, as well as the Netherlands (where he was born). During that time he worked for various industry-leading firms in senior positions, most recently as global multi-asset strategist and portfolio manager. Patrick has a PhD and two master’s degrees. One is from UC Berkeley where he was a member of its Master in Financial Engineering (MFE) inaugural class, aka “Rubinstein’s Guinea Pigs”. His professional investment qualifications include the VBA (Dutch version of CFA), the CEFA and the CMT designations.