Dream Visualiser
Generative Visual Art Project – commissioned by Alt-w
Cycle 15 Alt-w Production Award
31st Oct 2023 to 6th January 2024 / FREE
Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen AB10 1QS
For more information visit the Alt-w website
Generative animation by Aberdeen-born composer and conductor Luci Holland representing the phases of activity our brain’s experience during sleep, created in partnership with neuroscience researcher Narelle Freeman, who is also a musician. Neurological and diary data become a liquid dreamscape, visualising the five stages of human sleep.
Dream Visualiser – A Neuroscience Summary
By Narelle Freeman & Luci Holland
As we go about our daily lives we each carry around an amazing piece of equipment in our heads – one that keeps us alive, keeps us safe, and interprets the world around us so we can make sense of everything we experience. Most importantly, our human brain learns, organises and responds to the masses of information it receives every second with astonishing complexity and finesse.
Even with all the advances in neuroscience and technology, we still cannot say for sure what is happening in the brain when our neurons fire in response to incoming information from our environment. One way of describing what we do know is through a cocktail party scenario. Picture a cocktail party in a very large room, filled with many many people all talking among themselves. High up in the ceiling there are microphones dotted around. When something like a loud noise happens, several groups of people will increase their chatter in response. The microphones can detect which groups of people responded, where they were, the intensity of the increase in their chatter, how quick their responses were and how long their responses lasted. However, the microphones cannot detect what was said in all that chatter. This is essentially what is happening when we monitor our brains using EEG (electroencephalography). We have come to know which areas of the human brain are involved in responses to particular activities such as listening to music, learning a language and remembering how to ride a bike. But what are the neurons in those areas actually communicating? That’s an interesting question! Then we take that question one step further…
While we are awake and wearing an EEG headset, we can directly associate the activity we are doing with the neurons that fired in response. But what is our brain up to when we are asleep? During sleep our brain activity changes as we go through different parts of the sleep cycle, and it increases up to the point of REM sleep where the level of brain activity is much like being awake. But this time it is the brain itself that has generated the stimuli that fired up the neurons. Our dreams are the result of our brain being exceptionally creative.
This idea poses many questions. For example, where does the brain get its creative ideas from, and what impact does this have on our theories of consciousness? Some of these questions may not ever be able to be answered by neuroscience alone. But the history of advancements in science shows time and again how important it is for us to imagine and visualise what might be before we can invent the science to confirm it. Therefore, perhaps our awake state creativity can help us to make more sense of our dreaming brains.
In the Dream Visualiser, EEG data recorded during sleep representing five headset channel nodes and brainwave activity is fed into a system built using TouchDesigner to generate visual “dream translations”. This data informs elements of the resulting visuals such as the shapes, pace, and colour palette, and is paired with dream journal entries and rough sleep cycle timeframes to depict artistic representations of the dreamer’s mind when the data was captured.
The Dream Visualiser animations are an innovative and thoughtful interpretation of dream state EEG data. Watching how they move and interact does inspire ideas of what the dreamer’s brain might have been up to… And perhaps there’s much more to imagine here?
