The brain side of Information technology : an exploration with low cost EEG devices

An emerging problem in IT is how human communication, mediated by computer systems, evolves in new and unexpected ways. Diffusion of social networks, virtual reality, videogames, e-learning, mobile communication are changing the way, in particular, teen and young people interact and exchange experience and emotions. To understand and explore the effects on human beings of the new communication paradigms is a challenge that can be tackled by studying it by multiple viewpoints, from perception to high cognitive and psychological levels and recurring to advanced signal processing methods. The availability of low cost EEG recording devices allows us to perform a large amount of experiments, providing the possibility of sound data interpretation, and setting up simulated and real environmental experiment set up. We are less interested in the study of non-elementary perceptual phenomena, rather focused to study interpersonal or human-computer communication processes, by observing brain behaviour through EEG signal analysis. As a matter of fact, visual and auditory perception, still remain the primary means of such communication processes, but higher level brain phenomena are possibly more appealing. Experiments on EEG already demonstrate that not only a visual, motor or auditory stimulus can be detected, but also the imagination of the stimulus itself can also be detected, so opening the road to brain computer interaction. In this paper we will present some preliminary results from experiments on music, colour perception and mono vs. stereo video viewin

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