Age of Arts 2019

“Light up, light up, as if you have a choice”, the choir from the Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing (MISA) sang at the top of their lungs in the Paccar Theatre of the Science Gallery on April 18^th. The MISA choir performance lit up the audience and set the mood for Age of Arts 2019, an exciting afternoon where creativity across the lifespan was celebrated and encouraged. Prof Brian Lawlor (Deputy Executive Director of the Global Brain Health Institute) stepped onto the stage, gave the audience a warm welcome and guided us throughout the event.

Prof Román Romero Ortuño (Professor of Gerontology at TCD) took inspiration from the MISA choir and shared a video of how one member felt about their involvement; the choir means “getting up on Monday morning and knowing you’re going to have a very good day”. This is not just an individual’s fleeting perception. Prof Romero Ortuño argued that creativity is a ‘brain stimulator’. Preliminary findings [1] show that repeated engagement in creative activities is associated with structural changes in the brain. Prof Romero Ortuño explained that this may be due to the myriad of brain functions that are involved in creative activities.

[1] From the Irish longitudinal study on ageing (TILDA).

Singing, for example, engages multiple brain functions; motor control is required to maintain posture and rhythmical breathing, attention allows us to focus on external cues, like background music, memory helps us remember the melodies and lyrics, and emotion is invariably involved. This and other findings have caused a change in the culture of health care, where creativity has become part of the health care approach. One example of this is the Creative Life Centre at St. James’s Hospital Dublin. In this centre, collaborations with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) have provided space for co-creations between artists and patients.

Expanding on the collaboration between patients and students, Prof Philip Napier (Head of the School of Fine Art at NCAD) explained his interest on crossing borders between knowledge fields and communities, and how this crossover can feed new art. One way of crossing communities is to expose students to experiences vastly dissimilar to their own. To achieve this, Prof Napier co-ordinates      Studio+, a program within NCAD, where the interactions between students and patients challenges the perceptions, and allows for the creation of new art forms that would not otherwise have been possible.

Crossing borders was also a theme discussed by Dr Tara Byrne, manager of Arts & Culture at Age & Opportunity and director of the      Bealtaine festival, Ireland’s only national festival celebrating the arts and creativity as we age. Dr Byrne proposed that arts should not be in a silo, but instead, should be accessible to the public. All generations, so-called artists and artists in-the-making contribute to Irish life, and that is why the Bealtaine festival is so important. This festival is supported by Age & Opportunity, an organisation that promotes positive attitudes towards ageing. And what better way to have a positive attitude than to stay connected to others and enjoy the act of being creative through artistic endeavours? At the same time, Dr Byrne also reminded us that arts should be created with arts’ sake in mind, and not just as secondary outcomes of well-being. She definitely gave the audience some food for thought.

In the the same way that the arts should not be in a silo, Dr Francesca Farina (postdoctoral researcher at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience) proposed that science should not be siloed either. Historically, science and art have had a symbiotic relationship, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s works. But currently, these two fields are perceived as separate or with little interaction. Dr Farina invited us to challenge this perception and suggested that art can facilitate complex scientific findings reaching the general public. Another misperception highlighted is the idea that creativity is only for young people. Dr Farina argued against this idea, stating that creativity helps in improving self-acceptance and motivation, and providing meaning to life. The new experiences that creative activities provide keep our brain active, malleable, ‘plastic’ (plasticity meaning the brain’s ability to change with experience). So, we could all use a bit of creativity in our lives.

To put everything we learnt into practice, Dr Jane Bentley, founder of ArtBeat, directed a musical workshop where everyone in the audience participated. More than 120 people making music ended the afternoon with a high note, and it reminded us of what the MISA choir had sang at the start:

“Let me be myself in the evenin’ breeze/

Listen to the murmur of cottonwood trees/

Send me off forever but I ask you please/

Don’t fence me in”.

Special thanks to: everyone who attended this event, Prof Brian Lawlor (event chair), the MISA choir, Norah Walsh (choir director), Emmet O’Connor (piano accompanist), Prof Román Romero Ortuño, Prof Philip Napier, Dr Tara Byrne, Dr Jane Bentley, Roisin Nevin (co-ordinator of the Creative Life Centre at MISA), Prof Áine Kelly (co-ordinator of the Public Programme for BNA2019), Prof Robert Whelan, the Global Brain Health Institute, our volunteers and generous sponsors.

By Laura Rueda-Delgado.

Age of Arts 2019 Organising Committee:

Francesca Farina, TCD; Laura Rueda-Delgado, TCD; Róisín Nevin, MISA; Gabi Pragulbickaite, TCD

Human CentipEEG project

Our interdisciplinary team developed and presented ‘Human CentipEEG’ project during the ‘Hack The Brain’ hackathon held in Dublin on 9-11 June 2017. It was selected by the BrainHack consortium to be a “spinal project” (i.e. it showed exceptional potential for further development and was chosen to be eligible to apply for the DART17 programme).

In Human CentipEEG, three individuals — by virtue of their EEG as they relax — effectively become one organism responding to multisensory inputs in real time, with each person acting as one sense modality. Visual input will be perceived by the first person, and their resultant EEG signal was converted into musical output; this music was heard by the second person, whose elicited EEG was converted to tactile vibrations; a third person experienced these tactile sensations, and their recorded EEG was converted into the visual output perceived by the first person. As one participant relaxed, their alpha brain wave will increase, which will influence the input next participant receives and signal them to relax.

This ambitious project created a closed loop of the three participants, whereby the emergent EEG at each stage of the processing chain was converted into a different sensory modality based on the degree of relaxation. This self-perpetuating cycle of relaxation raises new exciting possibilities to create systems to enable EEG altruism/karma where your calm benefits the next person but will eventually come back to you. Human CentipEEG was able to successfully turn the electroencephalogram into both the stimulus and the response, posing the question: where does the signal begin, and where does it end?