Neuroaesthetics Symposium

Our sensory systems interact to provide a robust representation of the world around us and to optimise our perception of the objects, people and places that occupy this world. The extent to which the senses interact to shape our preferences for certain stimuli over others is, however, relatively poorly understood. In this talk I will discuss how our preferences might be shaped by general experiences with multisensory stimuli, and from the perceptual and cognitive processing of multisensory information. In particular, I will review recent behavioural evidence suggesting that perception benefits from multisensory inputs, and neuroimaging studies suggesting the underlying neural mechanisms supporting these interactions. Moreover, for some individuals, sensory stimulation in one modality can give rise to perceptual experience in another modality. This condition, known as synaesthesia, can provide further insights into how the senses interact for everyday perception. Our research suggests that synaesthesia is supported by general perceptual mechanisms involved in multisensory integration, but that synaesthetes benefit from enhanced processing of certain sensory information. Together these investigations help towards a better understanding of the perceptual basis of aesthetic responses. Dr. Fiona Newell is Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Neuroscience in Trinity College Dublin. She leads the Multisensory Cognition Group that conducts investigations into perceptual function in humans. The goal of this research is to elucidate the brain and behavioural processes involved in the multisensory perception of objects, faces and scenes. Recently, this research has broadened into investigations of synaesthesia, as well as developmental processes in multisensory perception. Her research group has played a significant role in large international studies and has published in many of the leading academic journals. Newell obtained her Ph.D. in 1993 and was subsequently awarded an Addison-Wheeler Fellowship in Life Sciences from the University of Durham, UK. Following post-doc positions in the Weizmann Institute, Israel and Max Planck Institute, Germany, in 2000 she joined the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin. In 2006 she became a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, and in 2008 a Professor of Psychology.

Rising interest in theories of embodiment highlight the need to better understand the relation of action and conscious perception. Specifically, we investigate the concept that the quality of sensory awareness is determined by systematic change of afferent signals resulting from behaviour and knowledge thereof. The feelSpace belt provides qualitatively new sensory signals, relating the orientation of the subject to magnetic north. The resulting transformation laws, linking change of sensory signals and actions by the subject, establish sensorimotor contingencies. The study demonstrates that the signals provided by the feelSpace belt improve behavioural performance, influence physiologic reactions and lead to qualitative changes in perceptual effects. These results provide evidence for a causal role of sensorimotor contingencies in perceptual awareness. In a follow-up we study sensory enhancement in a congenitally blind subject. Consistent with an earlier report improved behavioural performance and perceptual effects could be induced. However, unsupervised training by itself was not sufficient, and explicit instructions and training was necessary to ground the qualitatively new signals and provide associations with the available senses. A unified framework is presented that describes the interaction of sensory and motor systems as an interaction optimizing the predictability of sensory representations in the light of the behavioural repertoire. In summary, the presented experiments argue for a constitutive role of action in the formation of perception, although in some aspects it was dependent on available cognitive resources. Dr. Peter König is Professor of Neurobiopsychology at the University of Os- nabrück and director of the Institute of Cognitive Science. He studied physics and medicine at the University of Bonn. From 1978 to 1994 he was scholarship holder and research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main in the department of neurophysiology, and from 1995 to 1997 Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California. This was followed by his Habilitation thesis at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the conferring of the title of private lecturer. From 1997 to 2003 he worked at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the ETH Zurich as assistant professor. In 2009, he founded WhiteMatter Labs GmbH of which he is the scientific director. Since 2001, he is visiting professor at the Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

In my installation piece The Undistorted Image of… I proceed from a short passage in Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology. While explaining how the movement of light through the eye and brain forms images, Descartes puts forth the possibility of these images passing through the arteries of a pregnant woman to form birthmarks on the foetus. Using this installation and samples of other artwork, mainly from the project Occular* Witness, I will present different ideas that have evolved from working with light, vision, and meaning in a world overflowed with information and image. *occular: adj. (see occult and ocular) that which passes the visual system and simultaneously remains hidden, invisible to the observer. The term occular is used when the apparently real is difficult to identify, considering reality as it is depicted through mediated layers of electromagnetic transmissions (signal transmission through implants, external or extrasensory sources). The smallest component in the occular context is usually a photon, referring to the light energy that passes the body and leaves traces in the flash of a moment (in: Encyclopaedia of the Future, Glänta, 3/2008). Arijana Kajfes is a visual artist born in Croatia, based in Sweden. Her work has its outset in sculpture and installation. She has worked in several interdisciplinary projects and was part of the Smart Studio research group at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm (1999–2004). She often works with process-contained installations using both objects and electronic media, conceptually moving on the borderlines of perception and meaning, interested in uncertainties and what representation is in its becoming stage.

The study of culture and biology have historically been stratified, however, recent theoretical and methodological advances in cultural and biological sciences provide novel opportunities for understanding the nature and origin of human diversity by bridging these gaps. Cultural neuroscience is an emerging interdisciplinary science that investigates cultural variation in psychological, neural and genomic processes as a means of articulating the bidirectional relationship of these processes and their emergent properties. Here I will discuss how cultural and genetic diversity affect mind, brain and behavior across multiple timescales. Specifically, in this talk, I will review recent evidence elucidating the effect of cultural values, practices, and beliefs, such as individualism-collectivism, racial identification, and preference for social hierarchy, on brain and behavior. I will also present evidence for culture-gene coevolution of individualism-collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR). Finally, I will examine the implications of cultural neuroscience research for addressing population health disparities and public policy across the globe. Dr. Joan Y. Chiao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 studying social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Her main research interests include cultural neuroscience of emotion and social interaction, social and affective neuroscience across development, social dominance and affiliation, and integrating psychology and neuroscience research with public policy and population health issues. Chiao currently serves on the board of several journals including Culture and Brain, NeuroImage, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Social Neuroscience, Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. From 2009 to 2010, she served as editor for an edited volume of Progress in Brain Research on cultural neuroscience called Cultural Neuroscience: Cultural Influences on Brain Function and a special issue on cultural neuroscience in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Dr. Chiao is a recipient of funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Technology. In 2011, she was named a Rising Star by the American Psychological Society and received a NIMH Early Career International Travel Award.

»Looking from within – On the concept “neuronal aesthetics”« For Olaf Breidbach at stake is a new phenomenology, which does not divide nature and culture into two fields, apprehends them separately nor reduces one side to the other. In viewing our environment we orient ourselves on the specific properties of our senses and our brain. Here we find that these properties are modified as a reaction to our culture, which also orients our minds. Neural activity is not merely an effect of evolution, it is a reflex to a culture, and it should be interpreted in this twofold sense as a unity. This is about a new, integrative phenomenology that will again connect our experience to our corporeality, while at the same time conceiving the body as embedded in its culture and, therefore, in a history that points beyond mere nature. Prof. Dr. Olaf Breidbach teaches history of science at the Friedrich-Schiller- University Jena where he is Director of the Institute of the History of Medicine, Natural Sciences, and Technology and the Ernst Haeckel Haus museum. In addition to the history of modern science, he is interested in theoretical biology, the development of an experimental history of science, and the structuring of non-discursive practices and perspectives of neural aesthetics. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. His last three book publications include Goethes Naturverständnis, Munich, 2011; Radikale Historisierung. Kulturelle Selbstversicherung im Postdarwinismus, Berlin, 2011; Anschauung denken, Munich, 2011. Forthcoming is his book Neuronale Ästhetik: Zur Morpho-Logik des Anschauens, Munich.

Using Neuroaesthetics, which I began lecturing upon in 1996 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, as a model I will first explain the differences between artistic, art historical and scientific research.  Subsequently, through my art works If it looks like art it probably isn‘t, The Education of the Eye, Rainbow Brushes, The Noologist‘s Handbook and finally The Sound of Cats Meowing I will illustrate the power of art as a cultural and neuroplastic modulator. Finally, I will explore artistic research in the context of Cognitive Capitalism. Warren Neidich is an artist and writer who works in multiple media. He has recently been exploring the conditions of cognitive capitalism using noise music as an inspiration for installations made of speakers, drawings, and videos which set up what he refers to as dissonant resonances. He has been exhibited internationally at such institutions as MoMa PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MuKHA, Antwerp; and Galerie Fons Welters in Amsterdam. He recently received the Fulbright Scholar Program Fellowship, Fine Arts Category, 2011 and the Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Berlin, 2010. He is author of numerous publications including Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (2002), Lost Between the Extensivity/Intensivity Exchange (2009), Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics (2011). His work The Noologist’s Handbook and Other Art Experiments is forthcoming in 2012 with Archive Books, Berlin.

Despite enormous and widespread enthusiasm for the project of using the methods of neuroscience to investigate art and its importance for us, results have been few and far between. In this talk – focusing on a range of cases, but with special attention to the problem of pictorial representation – I propose that there may be principled reasons why neuroscience will fail to make a productive contribution to the study of art. Dr. Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He received his Ph.D. in 1995 from Harvard University. He also holds degrees from Columbia and Oxford Universities. Noë has been a fellow of the Wissensschaftskolleg zu Berlin and he is a permanent fellow of the Humboldt University Research Project on Embodiment and the Picture-Act. Noë is “philosopher in residence” with the Forsythe Company andhe is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004), Out of Our Head: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness (FSG / Hill and Wang, 2009), and Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012).

For two years now, artist Tim Otto Roth and mathematical neuroscientist Benjamin Staude have been working in the Sound Dome of the ZKM, where they make the fascinating world of neuronal interactivity come alive using synthetic audio neurons. In the Sonapticon Roth and Staude combine a unique translation of neuronal systems’ electrical communication into acoustic communication via the forty-three loudspeakers of the Sound Dome with the deceleration of biological neuronal processes that take place on the timescale of milliseconds. In this way, in the Sonapticon neuronal communication mechanisms become both a sensual and a comprehensible experience. Intuitive understanding of the acoustic feedback through sine tones in the Sound Dome space is complemented visually through lights mounted on the speakers indicating firing activity and a visualization of the changing membrane potentials projected onto the floor. Thus, with their Sonapticon, Roth and Staude transform the Sound Dome into a new instrument for which they have developed a special method of composing in and with the Sound Dome space: setting the connections, choice and location of scales up to the 1/8 tone range, and tempo variation. At the concert premiere three solo Piccolo flute players demonstrate different facets of the Sonapticon through their precise interven- tions, which ranged from a microtonal soundscape to a pseudo-repetitive pat- tern in the inaudible sound spectrum of ultra sound – a musical brainstorm. More information on the work can be found on: www.pixelsex.org/sonapticon. Tim Otto Roth studied politics and philosophy in Tübingen before he changed to studying liberal arts at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. Since 2008, he is a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In 1997, Roth gave his first major audiovisual performance with Rudi Meier (composition) and Christoph Böhme (electronics) at various venues including the Donaueschingen Society of the Friends of Music. Since 2002, Roth has aroused attention with his large-scale projects in public spaces. In many of his projects he works closely together with scientists (from KIT Karlsruhe, the European Space Agency, and NASA, amongst others). He has received numerous awards, including the 2004 German Light Art Award LUX.US, Lüdenscheid, and the International Media Art Award of the SWR and ZKM | Karlsruhe in 2004; he received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica, Linz, in 2009. After his studies of mathematics and philosophy at the Technische Universität Berlin with a focus on differential geometry and philosophy of science, Dr. Benjamin Staude turned his interest to Computational Neuroscience. With a NaFöG scholarship at the Freie Universität Berlin and two years as a research assistant at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako-Shi, Japan, he received his doctorate in biology in 2008 from the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg. After two more years as a research associate at the Bernstein Center of Computational Neuroscience Freiburg, Staude moved back to Berlin where he works as a scientific consultant and programmer for arts and science projects (for example, with Tim Otto Roth, Rainer Dunkel, and Archimedes GmbH), and as a musician in various bands and projects (Mariahilff, Kapaikos).

The ego of a person is central for its perception of the environment, including various cultures. In philosophy, the concept of the ego has been frequently discussed under the term “self” or “subject”. Recently, psychology and neuroscience have also begun to study the self. This gives rise to the question, to what extent the dependence of the self on a cultural context is mirrored in the neural activity of the brain. My contribution explores these findings and issues, and considers the self in the context of brain and culture. It concludes by discussing the implications of these results for our self-understanding as self, subject, and human being. Prof. Dr. med. Dr. phil. Georg Northoff studied medicine and philosophy in Hamburg, Essen, Bochum, and New York. He was Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Neurophilosophy and Director of the Laboratory for Imaging and Neurophilosophy at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. Since 2009, he holds the Chair of Mind, Brain, and Neuroethics Research at the University of Ottawa,Canada, which was created especially for him. Dr. Northoff’s goal is to establish neurophilosophy as a separate discipline that is independent from philosophy and neuroscience.

Sounds are vibrations in the ambient air, but sounds are also perceptual entities that I will call, for lack of better terminology, auditory objects. The relationships between sounds and the resulting auditory objects are indirect: auditory objects are synthesized in the auditory system through a long and complicated sequence of processes which are only partially understood, which are largely pre-attentive, but which may be experience-dependent. It is natural to assume that once these auditory objects are created, their inter-relationships are processed to uncover the organization of the sound stream. I will show that, surprisingly, the synthesis of auditory objects is to a large extent preceded by pre-attentive processes that organize auditory objects in time, creating complex expectations and detecting their fulfillment or violation. These are universal processes that seem to be present in all vertebrates. Such processes are engaged in humans when listening to music, so that in as much as music is organized sound, brains (including the human brain) extract organization before they construct sounds. After undergraduate studies of mathematics and physics (B.Sc. 1982, Hebrew University), Prof. Dr. Israel Nelken turned neurobiologist (M.Sc. 1985, Ph.D. 1991, Hebrew University; postdoctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA), specializing in the auditory system. Since 1994 Nelken is on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel (full professor since 2008). He received the Katz prize in 2000 and the Michael Bruno prize in 2008. His research centers on the coding of natural and naturalistic scenes in the central auditory system, using methods that span the range from single-neuron recordings in animal models to recordings of evoked potentials in humans.

How people think about the self strongly influences their social communica- tion and behavior. Recent cultural neuroscience studies have shown increas- ing evidence for modulation of neural representation of the self by cultural contexts and cultural experiences. I will present our recent research that used different psychological paradigms and different brain imaging methods to in- vestigate cultural influences on neural mechanisms underlying self-reflection on personal attributes. I will also present preliminary brain imaging results that uncover how genes may interact with culture to shape the social brain network activity involved in reflection on the self and close others. These findings are helpful for understanding the biosocial nature of neural mechanisms of human self-concept. Dr. Shihui Han is a professor at the Department of Psychology, Peking Uni- versity. He is the director of the Cultural and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. He served as the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Peking University between 2003 and 2007. He studies cultural and genetic influences on neural substrates of social cognition such as self-referential processing, empathy, and theory-of-mind. He has published over a hundred research papers in journals such as Nature Review Neuroscience, Annual Review of Psychology, Brain, Journal of Neuroscience, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Psychological Science, NeuroImage, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Human Brain Mapping, Journalof Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Social Neuroscience, etc. He is now the chief editor of Culture and Brain and the associate editor of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscienc, Social Neuroscience, and Acta Psychologica Sinica.

— Train your body and brain through rhythmical phrases via talking, clapping, moving, and walking? — Enjoy your body & brain in examples of rhythm & groove — Synchronize in a group of individuals — Learn about archetypes of rhythms in a global setting Prof. Udo Dahmen is Artistic Director and Executive Director of the Pop Academy Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim, and Vice President of the German Music Council. After studying classical percussion at the music academies of Aachen and Cologne, he completed his studies with jazz drum tuition under Dante Agostini in Paris. From 1983 to 2003 he was lecturer at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre, and from 1994 to 2003 head of the Department of Rock, Pop, and Jazz at the Dinkelsbühl College of Music. Since 1995, he is President ofthe German drummers’ association “Percussion Creativ.” He is also a member of the board of trustees of the German Phonoacademy.

Although music is generally acknowledged as a powerful tool for eliciting emotions, little is known concerning the neurobiological basis of these emotions. We investigated the psychological and neurobiological basis of strong emotional responses to music (SEM), leading to shivers down the spine (chills) and changes in heart rate. From previous studies it is known that these SEMs are accompanied by the activation of a brain network that includes areas involved in reward, emotion, and motivation. In order to observe distinct acoustical and music structural elements related to chill reactions, in a series of experiments, on-line emotional self report and psychophysiological data was obtained while participants were listening to music inducing strong emotions and aesthetic feelings. Despite of highly individual emotional reactions towards music, some interindividually constant characteristics of music eliciting chill responses can be found. Chills were much more frequent in previously known music and in familiar music stiles. Furthermore, distinct musical events frequently caused strong emotional responses, especially when violating expectancies. These results demonstrate that strong emotional responses are not only related to the psychoacoustic properties of the respective pieces of music, but furthermore to biographical memories, personality traits and social environments. Prof. Dr. med. Eckart Altenmüller is a full university professor and medical doctor, and has an active clinical and academic research career. He holds a Masters degree in Classical flute, and a M.D. and Ph.D. degree in Neurology and Neurophysiology. Between 1983 and 1985, he held a postdoctoral position in the department of Clinical Neurophysiology in Freiburg. In this position, he performed research into brain activation during auditory processing of music and learning of fine motor skills, an area in which he has published extensively. He received his clinical training in Neurology at the Department of Neurology at the University of Tübingen between 1985 and 1992, and was appointed Assistant Professor in Neurology in 1992. Since 1994 he is Chair and Director of the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine at the University of Music Drama and Media in Hannover. He continues research into movement disorders in musicians as well as motor, auditory and sensory learning. He has published more than 120 peer reviewed papers on this topic and received 18 grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Since 2005 he is a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

Numerous studies conducted under the banner of cultural psychology during the last two decades have documented substantial cultural variation in attention and perception. This literature has made three important points. First, whereas people in Western cultures tend to place a greater emphasis on an object in lieu of its context, those in Eastern cultures tend to be more holistically attentive to both the object and its context and closely attuned to the relationship between the two. Second, although the origin of this cultural difference is multifaceted, one potent factor is the culturally dominant mode of the self and social relations. The object-focused perception and the holistic perception have been traced back, respectively, to an independent or an interdependent form of the self and social relations. Third, although behavioral evidence is indispensable, neuroscience investigations of culture and perception have presented a strikingly strong promise, beginning to uncover important neural bases of the cultural variation in attention and perception. In this lecture, I will review evidence pertaining to each of these points and discuss some implications for cultural variations in art forms and art appreciation. Dr. Shinobu Kitayama is Robert B. Zajonc Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He also directs the University’s Center for Culture, Mind, and the Brain. Over the last two decades, he investigated cultural variations in self and other related psychological processes including cognition, emotion, and motivation. Most recently, he has started to examine the neural basis of these cultural variations, with the ultimate goal to better understand the nature of the mutually constitutive process between cultural beliefs and practices and the human brain. Before Michigan, he taught at Oregon, Kyoto, Stanford, and Chicago. He was a Fellow, twice, at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA (1995–1996, 2007–2008). A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has been inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work on culture and self with Hazel Rose Markus (Psychological Review, 1991) is one of the most frequently cited in the entire field of social and behavioral sciences.

“Qualia” to some refers to the absolute, unique quality of a conscious sensory experience, which may not be “explained away” by neurophysiology. Whereas we do not endorse to the qualia as a “hard” (that is impossible in principle) problem for science, we still agree that the current sensory sciences fail to critically characterize such unique quality of sensory experiences. We aim to find insights in the latest progresses of sensory substitution. The “vOICe” is one of such devices translating visual into auditory inputs for blind people. There are some superusers who claim “visual” experiences. Moreover, some of them showed neural activity in the visual cortical areas in fMRI, when engaged in a variety of tasks relying on this type of device. Our strategy is to come up with a brief list of psychophysical and neuroscientific criteria for “vision-like” processing, and to search for empirical evidence, including (1) cortical mapping of space via the device, (2) accomplishment of perceptual constancy, and (3) intrinsic (synesthesia-like) crossmodal mapping. The results suggest that “qualia”, if one still wants to use such a word, should be understood with regard to adaptive behavior. Moreover, what such training/experience accomplishes should be characterized best as the third kind of “qualia”. Enrichment of sensory experiences due to intrinsic and associative mapping provides scientists and artists with ample opportunities. Prof. Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo is an experimental psychologist/cognitive neuroscientist, with long-standing interests in visual psychophysics and their applications to visual illusions, cross-modal plasticity, human emotion, preferences, and decision-making. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Tokyo (1978, 1980), and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1985). He is currently Gertrude Baltimore Professor in Experimental Psychology in the division of Biology/Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. His laboratory at Caltech has been applying quantitative psychophysical techniques to understand human implicit perception and social behaviors, with applications of eye tracking, fMRI, EEG, TMS and tDCS, and other techniques. He has approximately 150 publications, including multiple papers in high-impact journals, such as Nature, Science, Nature Neuro-science, and Neuron. He is also known for his collaborations with artists, and a science column (ASAHI WEBRONZA).

In my talk I will review the structural and functional imaging studies on synaesthesia. Since many imaging studies have focused on grapheme-colour synaesthesia, the emphasis of my talk will reflect this, and so I will give a summary of the current knowledge about structural and functional brain differences in grapheme-colour synaesthetes in particular. Moreover, I will examine how these structural and functional imaging results might inform current theories about the neural mechanisms of synaesthesia. Initially, functional imaging studies concentrated on the phenomenology of synaesthetic experiences: activation of colour-processing areas in the brain confirmed the “perceptual reality” of these experiences. Further studies ex- plored the neural correlate of individual differences in synaesthesia with the help of functional imaging. Recently, modern network analysis methods have been applied in the field of synaesthesia to assess the neural network architecture during rest and task performance in grapheme-colour synaesthetes. These advances in functional imaging were paralleled by studies using structural imaging methods, like voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to explore grey and white matter differences in synaesthesia, respectively. Finally, I will also provide a critical discussion of the kinds of limitations found in previous approaches to studying synaesthetic brain differences, and I discuss future perspectives and challenges that structural and functional neuroimaging research in synaesthesia will face. Prof. Dr. Peter Weiss-Blankenhorn studied medicine at the Heinrich-Heine- University Düsseldorf. After research projects on Parkinson’s disease in Arizona, USA, and on apraxia in Lyon, France, he was trained in neurology at the University Hospitals in Düsseldorf and Aachen, Germany. As a board-certified neurologist he works in the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-3) of the Research Centre Jülich (FZJ), Germany, leading the group “Motor Cognition”. Since 2010, he is also professor of cognitive neurology at the University of Cologne, Germany. In addition to synaesthesia, his scientific interests in the area of cognitive neurology are focused on the neural basis of cognitive deficits after stroke using structural and functional imaging. This translational research aims at the development of new, innovative therapies for neurorehabilitation.

Helga Griffiths has been working for over 20 years on the integration of various sensory stimuli into her multi-sense installations. With reference to several practical examples (one of which ‒ the animated video Brainscape ‒ will be shown during the conference), she illustrates some of the advantages, but also some of the difficulties that she has encountered in this approach. A successful experience space as she terms it, enables the percipient to immerse him- or herself in a multi-dimensional sensory space and experience memories, emotions and ideas that originate from, but at the same time are not necessarily identical to, the memories, emotions and ideas of the artist. Typical of Griffiths’ work is her technique of taking sensory information received through one sense (e.g. sight or sound) and transforming it into another, such as odor, in order to communicate with the percipient at a more direct, intuitive level and enable the sensory immersion experience to transcend conventional boundaries of perception. Helga Griffiths is a Multi-Sense-Artist working at the intersection of science and art. She holds a B.F.A. from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and from 1992–1994 completed her postgraduate studies at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. In 1994 she continued with further studies in New Media at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. She received several awards such as the first prize at “Kunst auf Zeit” in Graz, an “Honorable Mention” at the International Biennale of Paper Art in Düren, the “Lichtenberg”- Award (all in 1998), and the first prize at “LichtRouten”- festival in Lüdenscheid in 2003. She received grants for artist residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris in 2001 and an NEA grant at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Puerto Rico in 2004. Her work is in permanent collections such as the TBA TV Station in Tokyo, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, or the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, Germany. She has exhibited her multi-sense-installations at several biennials such as Cairo Biennale, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan, Havanna Biennial, and Seoul International Media Art Biennale. Her work has been shown in international museum exhibitions like the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; Artificial Light in Art Centre, Eindhoven; Kunsthalle Kiel, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Upper Austrian Culture Quarter, Linz, and at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

All perception is based on the topology of neuronal swarms. The brain is a swarm of that kind: harmonic aesthetic experiences are based upon the isomorphy of neural structures in the brain, that is topological compatibility between communicators and recipients, while an anisomorphy evokes disharmonic interpretations of aesthetic signals. Based upon the topology of a superstructure similar to the brain, it will be attempted to audially depict the chaotic trajectory which is called thinking, and make the harmonics of a thought hearable to the naked eye. The holy harmonies, the music invoked by the mythical muses, present themselves as a mathematical set of signs and are spawned by mechanical vibrations: as melodies. Reto Schölly is a Swiss artist. He studied cybernetics and business administra- tion in Stuttgart and worked initially as an author of technical books, programmer, and project manager. After small projects in painting, street theater, and music he is now preparing a dissertation on the subject of cybernetic reflexivity between humans, technology, art, and mysticism. In 2010, he participated in Bazon Brock’s lecture series “Pythagoras in Delphi” at the German Historical Museum Berlin and at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. His exhibitions include MATGX_BLAU at the Contemporary Art Ruhr, in the Arttower Berlin, an exhibition of 33 matrix graphics at the A+K Freiburg, and “Poetry of Mathematics” at the Kultur- und Bürgerhaus Denzlingen. He is the author of the book Linuxprogrammierung mit C++, published in 2001 by Data Becker.