Keynote Speakers

Scott Makeig

Mobile Brain/Body Imaging of Social, Affective, and Creative Agency BA

Affective expression, perception, and communication -- including aesthetic and artistic perception -- gives a sense of value and meaning to our life, as well as organizing our behavior. Our extensive brain sub-system supporting affective perception, awareness, and behavior has evolved in parallel with brain systems supporting physical perception and awareness of our environment and our behavioral interactions with it. Our affective perception and communication systems may largely operate outside our focus of explicit attention. Yet their functioning is crucial to making everyday decisions and interacting with others. In particular, our capacities for feeling and expressing empathy and compassion are essential to our development and maintenance of social relationships -- within family, community, and society.

I believe the evolutionary basis of our aesthetic perception and appreciation, and thus all human artistic activities, has arisen from our basic need to continually discern what others around us are feeling. We have many personal, social, and culturally-promoted reasons to ‘hide our feelings’ from one another. Yet emotional state and its behavioral expression are our best clues to the intent and future actions of others, and thus are our best guide in choosing how to interact with them. Our affective perception system is always ‘on,’ always attempting to interpret our experience in terms of human feeling character. Thus, as perceived through the lens of our affective perception, a bird’s flight may appear to us ‘exhilarating,’ a sudden car honk ‘indignant,’ the flowing lines of a garment ‘seductive,’ an orchestral horn flourish ‘triumphant,’ etc.. It is our seemingly ’invisible’ but 'felt' brain system supporting affective perception of the feelings of others that makes possible and supports human artistic perception, communication, enjoyment, and activity.

How to perform brain/body imaging of authentic affective and artistic experience and expression? A most difficult and far too often ignored or undervalued task here is to design and execute experimental protocols that capture periods, even brief, in which authentic affective experience, expression, and communication dominate a participant’s experience. Empathic psychotherapists, nurses, teachers, and parents know much about how to develop sufficient trust to enable others to attend empathically and to express authentic feelings in their company. A useful observation is that hypnotized subjects tend to have unusually strong and ready access to affective experience. Effective protocols to record MoBI data in which brain and body movement dynamics supporting affective perception and communication dominate may thus benefit from using guided imagery methods that approach self-hypnosis. Using such methods can allow and encourage participants to experience and express deep, authentic feeling during brain/body imaging experiments. The same difficulties apply to experiments involving artistic experience and expression. The ability to induce intense affective experience in others through music or dance performance, graphic design -- that is, to exercise affective agency -- is rare, and all societies celebrate the relatively few artists who achieve this most effectively. Capturing MoBI data during such authentic artistic expression and experience is not a matter of luck; it is a goal that can only be achieved through careful design of suitable protocols and a deliberate personal approach.

Eduardo Macagno & Sergei Gepshtein

Neuroscience and architecture: emerging properties of a new discipline

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a group of architects and scientist in the United States met to discuss the need of collaboration between their disciplines. They were impressed by the emerging evidence of the built environment having pervasive effect our health and well-being. They were equally impressed by the lack of detailed understanding of the causal relationship between specific features of the built environment and the human responses they evoke. Architects and designers use observational data to make design decisions; they examine complex human behavior in complex environments that have many uncontrolled variables. At the same time, rigorous scientific studies have greatly increased our knowledge of human perception and behavior, and their neuronal mechanisms, in such disciplines as behavioral and systems neuroscience, cognitive science and experimental psychology. Can these sciences provide an empirical basis for causal analysis of human interaction with the built environment? What approaches could foster a fruitful collaboration between architects and scientists that will make such analysis possible and develop empirical foundation for design?

Searching for answers to these questions led to the creation of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). Launched in 2003 by the American Institute of Architects, the Academy set its goals on promoting “research in neuroscience and cognitive science to improve the design of the built environment.” ANFA board of directors is comprised of practicing architects and scientists, with the presidency rotating between representatives of these disciplines. The Academy organizes various meetings and workshops, talks and panels, and it awards seed funding for pilot studies that nurture the establishment of the new discipline.

Today, the ongoing work in this new field of research can be usefully construed as a two-way exchange of ideas, methods and results. Knowledge flowing from science to design helps designers to establish new standards of evidence and rigor in making design decisions. And knowledge flowing from design to science helps scientists to appreciate the cultural and societal implications of their research, and attain a broader perspective on scientific problems that have been defined narrowly and confined to the laboratory. We will consider several examples that illustrate both directions of this cross-disciplinary exchange. We will use sensory and motoric models of perceptual space as a particularly fruitful illustration, and as an arena of imminent and wide-ranging developments in both science and design.

Helen Huang

Ground truth motion artifacts and the influence of hair on EEG recordings

The influence of motion artifacts and hair on electroencephalography (EEG) recordings has gained attention recently. Both motion artifacts and hair have posed challenges for recording high-fidelity EEG signals since the technique was first used and continue to be a problem. Regarding motion artifacts, one recent innovation to address motion artifacts is the development of dual-layer EEG. One side of a dual-sided EEG electrode interfaces with the scalp like normal while the other side of the electrode interfaces with a conductive fabric cap to capture the external noise and movement artifacts. An assumption of dual-sided EEG is that the noise signal is the “ground truth” motion artifact, which is also present in the signal recorded from the scalp. In my lab, we are testing this assumption of dual-sided EEG electrodes using bench top tests. To date, we have found that the signals recorded from each side of a dual-sided EEG electrode with mirrored interfaces do not necessarily share the same temporal or frequency characteristics. Regarding the influence of hair on EEG research diversity and inclusion, recent discussions related to systemic racism in neuroscience have raised concerns that EEG research may not represent all racial and ethnic communities due to differences in hair characteristics. Voluminous, curly, and tightly coiled hair features, which are most found on individuals in the Black community, can pose difficulties with preparing and recording EEG. I will share results from a research survey of the EEG community addressing this topic (https://hellobrainlab.com/research/eeg-hair-project/). Current results suggest that there is a disproportionate exclusion of Black folks in EEG research. For mobile brain/body imaging findings to have the desired impact on science, engineering, medicine, and society, it is critical to consider factors such as different hair types that may inadvertently exclude racial and ethnic communities of the global population.