This piece uses traditional embroidery to enact its own conceptual premise: that complex systems arise from the accumulated interactions of simple elements. By documenting the creation process of iteratively layered threads, the work considers emergence as temporal process rather than static outcome. Each photograph captures a different stage in the piece's development, revealing how local interactions—thread crossing thread, colour meeting colour—compound into higher-order patterns that cannot be predicted from individual components. The circular constraints of the embroidery hoops function like the skull containing neural networks or the conceptual frameworks that bound cognition: apparent limitations that actually enable emergent complexity. As threading density increases, the negative space begins to cohere into the lateral profile of a human brain, connecting the work's process to its subject matter. Just as consciousness emerges from neural firing patterns—individual neurons meaningless in isolation but generating coherent experience through relational networks—the brain profile emerges only through sustained looking, requiring the same kind of perceptual threshold-crossing that characterizes emergent recognition everywhere. The physical labour of hand-threading insists on emergence as embodied process rather than abstract concept. Each intersection represents a micro-decision that participates in generating something larger than itself, unpredictable from any single thread's perspective. The work thus performs something of a loop: consciousness using consciousness to explore consciousness, reality constructing itself through the very processes it examines. Emergence suggests that reality itself might be less discovered than continuously generated through the patient accumulation of interactions—neural, social, material—that cross critical thresholds and crystallize into new forms of organization, revealing how our experience of the real is always already emergent. 

Carolyn Davison (https://www.instagram.com/brainbroidery/)

The loss of the sense of smell and taste can significantly affect a person’s life. Unfortunately, our society often underestimates the true capability of the sense of smell. To make it more equivalent to the other senses, I invented the word "nost". People who experience this loss refer to themselves as anosmatic, the medical term for it, as there is no common name, unlike the words for blindness or deafness.

Greek origin nostalgia: Nostos (return) and algos (pain). It means the suffering caused by the desire to return to one’s place of origin. 

Nostrils: Where smell occurs. 

Old English word: The second person singular of the Old English word nytan, which means “to not know.”

Anne Sikora

 From raw neural sparks to contemplative stillness, reality unfolds not as a fixed truth, but as a spectrum of interpretations. What we call real is constantly shaped by the mind: micro-galaxies that spin appear frozen, while motionless circles seem to whirl. Melodies swirl around us, yet where do they truly live: in the world, or in us?    This collage traces the arc from unprocessed experience to matured awareness, bridging infancy and introspection. It asks: which flavour of reality do we trust, the data of the external world, or the rich, shifting symphony within? Perhaps the most profound reality is not outside us, but the very subjectivity that colors our every perception.  - Hand-cut collage, using old magazines and glue.

Hüden Neşe

https://bsky.app/profile/hudennese.bsky.social https://x.com/meddcezirr?s=21&t=n6xY3AdDM_49iTymmcTEUA  

This a procedural 3D rendering that explores the intricacies and unraveling pathways of the dream state.

Dmitry Kemell

http://dmitrykemell.com

Procedural 3D rendering that interprets a visceral dream state.

Dmitry Kemell

http://dmitrykemell.com

The Charles River in winter shows its own cortex—frozen above, protecting a hidden and complex world below 

Goretti España Irla 

Emotions play an important role in the reality perception, both for the good and the negative. But just like Yin and Yang, it flows, and keeps balance, for good and bad. 

Diego Jauregui

The drawing represents neurons and their connection, its overall style orientated on a tractography. Painted with metallic colors, it should symbolise the beauty of the neurons connected. Every connection is a spark spreading across the brain, bringing light into the dark.

Eva Steckermeier

This work explores the intersection of neuroscience and printmaking by transforming complex brain connectivity maps into striking lithographic prints. This project translates the intricate pathways of white matter tracts—revealed through diffusion MRI tractography (see original image below)—into tangible artistic impressions, merging scientific precision with creative expression. Through this fusion of technology and traditional techniques, the work shows the beauty and structure of the human brain in a whole new way.

Daniëlle De Greef and Alexander Leemans 

(https://www.providi-lab.org) 

"jakós to będzie" is a Polish saying that means "everything will work out in the end" - void of any attempt to silverlining the stochasticity of the universe that governs and also enables life. The artist worked on this piece throughout the first year of her medical studies, adding a few branches every other day to the floral arrangement, ritualistically, in acknowledgment of the gradualness of growth.

Yigu Zhou

This collaborative project explores the intersection of art, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to visualize the dynamics of human consciousness. The project is particularly focused on disorders of consciousness, where individuals have varying levels of consciousness but are unable to physically respond due to severe brain injuries. The research goal is to offer an alternative way of looking at brain activity through the methods of art.  We use artificial intelligence to reduce the dimensionality of the data and create visualizations of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the human brain. By doing so we especially emphasize the crucial role of time and dynamics. Thus, our work provides a new perspective on the brain’s dynamic computation by finding a way to visualize high dimensional dynamic patterns emerging from neural activity. We aim to capture the patterns of the brain’s dynamic principles in an artistic representation inspired by slime mold behavior.  Brain regions derived from EEG electrode groupings become attractor points for digital agents. These agents behave like slime mold, dynamically tracing paths across a virtual space based on the strength of inter-regional connectivity. Their collective movements generate evolving visual networks that mimic neural communication. The accumulated agent trajectories over time transform into a voxel-based heatmap, which is then rendered as a 3D point cloud. This data is laser-engraved into a transparent crystal block (10 × 10 × 15 cm), physically embodying the complexity and fragility of neural connectivity. Once we have visually characterized a healthy brain’s dynamic pattern, we can then compare it to brain patterns in altered states of consciousness, such as anesthesia or disorders of consciousness. We challenge the question whether these patterns can really be the physical principle of human consciousness. What would the dynamic pattern of my brain look like? Consciousness remains one of the most enigmatic phenomena in neuroscience. Instead of pinpointing a single "consciousness area", the field of neuroscience largely agrees on the principle that consciousness emerges from complex spatio-temporal patterns of whole-brain activity. 

Charlotte Maschke & Mirko Febbo

https://www.instagram.com/mirko.febbo/

The Aha! moment, the state of ignition...

Dmitry Kemell

http://dmitrykemell.com

Internal visions of elastic plastic states.

Dmitry Kemell

http://dmitrykemell.com 

Region: Mouse Primary Somatosensory (S1) Cortex – region of the cortex implicated in the integration and processing sensory and motor signals.   Subject: Adult C57BL/6 mouse genetically expressing Thy-1 YFP (yellow fluorescent protein) in pyramidal neurons.  Imaging: Captured using a 10x objective on a LaVision Light-Sheet Ultramicroscope at the Bosch Institute, University of Sydney.  Description: A 3mm-thick mouse brain section underwent a tissue clearing method called CUBIC (clear, unobstructed brain/body imaging cocktails and computational analysis), which removes lipids and other tissue compounds rendering it transparent (while leaving brain architecture unaltered), resulting in clearer imaging data. 

Dr Kristie Leigh Smith

Accidents can make intriguing artistic finds! I didn’t know that when I hit "Run" on MATLAB while processing brain stimulation data from a motor learning experiment, webs of regression coefficients—spiraling, tangled and life-like— would emerge from participants who received intermittent theta burst stimulation to either the primary motor or somatosensory cortex following a motor adaptation task. The collapsed data across individuals and across time dissolved structure, revealing instead a sensory abstraction of learning itself. Each image in this four-part series—Adapt, Perceptually, Implicit or Explicit? and The Noise—was color-stylized to evoke the shifting tones of perception within the complexity of neuroplastic change. This work invites viewers to sense the hidden architecture of motor learning through both an analytical and perceptual lens, taking in its diversity of form, texture and composition.

Nicia John

IG @niciajohn or @crearte.ca

This rotating diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) visualisation of the arcuate fasciculus—a key white matter tract involved in language processing—was created using ExploreDTI. Developed during research into language function in individuals with psychosis, the piece invites reflection on the neural pathways that connect thought, speech, and mental health.

Dr. Joanne PM Kenney

@drjoannekenney https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanne-kenneyphd/