Brain, technology and creativity : BrainArt : a BCI-based entertainment tool to enact creativity and create drawing from cerebral rhythms

The present article presents a high-level study on creativity. From a theoretical point of view, we conceptualized cognitive framework of creativity based on the notion of balance between conscious and unconscious processes. Indeed, creativity may be considered a borderline state of mind, in which the thought seems to fluctuate in a near-consciousness state. When the idea arises to the consciousness, the mind turns back to its previous equilibrium, and divergent thinking is replaced by canonical thinking. Starting with this framework, we designed and developed an entertainment application, in which creativity is enacted by unconscious processes, but in collaboration with conscious motivation. Our aim was then to activate a new, dedicated balance between conscious and unconscious processes, in order to obtain a state of mind similar to the spontaneous creative process, but directly guided by brain activity without the intervention of verbal and semantic modulations. We developed BrainArt, which is essentially a workbench that allows users to create drawing using their own cerebral rhythms, that are then collected by a commercial BCI device. The application gave us the possibility to observe and analyze the spontaneous creative expression of the participants\u2019 insight during an experimental session, where users created an artwork using the application. Therefore, this work presents both the BrainArt application possibility for entertainment and freedom to express individual conscious and unconscious creative insight, as well as the preliminary experimental results obtained by a combined approach of statistical, signal and behavioral analysis

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