Art in the neuroscience ERA : how the brain understands and creates art

Neurosciences, and particularly Cognitive Sciences, study creativity for the implications in understanding human and machine approach to problem solving. In fact, subjects such as Cognitive Psychology, Brain Neurobiology and Artificial Intelligence, investigate creativity mechanisms related to the human brain and cognition. We can state that creativity is a part of every human daily activity, so that, to understand individuals behaviour and abilities and the mechanisms of mind, we must start from the creative process, as, in general, the search of a different (innovative) solution to a problem. In this paper, we will treat the cognitive aspect of the creative process, particularly starting from cognitive technologies, devices helping researchers to analyse the process by the point of view of the artificial and natural intelligences

Creative thinking: a brain computer interface of art

The artistic expressions are universally recognized as creative. It might be considered a window on the mind since an artwork implies a blend of implicit and explicit thinking processes and results in behaviors mediated by some media or epistemic instruments. In this sense, art may be seen as creativity enacted, since the mind/brain must interact with the surroundings so to close the cognitive loop open by inspiration. We can state that creativity is a part of every human daily activity, so that, to understand individuals\u2019 behavior, abilities, and the mechanisms of the mind, we must start from the creative process, as, in general, the search of a different (innovative) solution to a problem. In this paper, we will treat the cognitive aspect of the creative process and we describe an example of creativity enacted by the use of a Brain Computer Interface: the mind the chair project

The Creative Mind – DRACLE

Human creativity is not just the result of a cognitive encapsulated process, but is an online process that link together thoughts, emotions and sensory events in a complex fashion. Thanks to this property, that is to the development of mental reflection, we can always (or almost always) create a context in which to give sense to the world. Art and science are clear examples. Scientific research is clearly interested in mechanisms of translating the imagination, the pure thinking into something useful to a community in a social and economic sense. In particular, the contemporary cognitive science, which is slowly abandoning its traditional stand-alone paradigms, is increasingly taking the shape of an open range where it possible to exercise a fruitful crossfertilization between different disciplines (from computer science to psychology, from art to anthropology and mathematics) that more and more speak a similar language. This new frontier is what we call the paradigm of extended cognition. The performance, presented and discussed in this paper, is aimed at artists, scholars and experts interested in the whole world of creativity and the related psychological and neuro-cognitive mechanisms. The paper aims at explaining the possible benefits deriving from the contamination of Art and Science in order to understand how the mind and brain shape our experience through the dynamics of conscious and unconscious creativity mechanisms. We aim to contaminate the traditional academic thinking with the suggestions coming from the world of contemporary art and particularly, the installation aims to introduce a discussion on the critical issue of the creativity mediated by technology and, as a counterpart, the creative mood of technology