September 06, 2007
Brain Painting: The Aesthetics of Neuroscience
What do you get when you combine art and brainwaves? Brain painting. Colorful fractal images from electroencephalograms. Bill Scott from UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute along with others, recently developed a new neuroimaging technology that creates a fractal signature from an EEG. He has successfully utilized this technology as a form of EEG biofeedback.
His primary area of investigation has been the use of biofeedback in treating addiction and anxiety disorders and he has published, presented and taught in the techniques of biofeedback for use in clinical practice.
The Brain Paint software when used in a biofeedback clinical situation, compares previous responses to questions with current responses and calculates specific recommendations to improve results. It also calculates and stores subtle indicators of progress in growth scores; these are then referenced to find protocols that work well and flag protocols that you may want to avoid with a particular individual. It also gives audio and visual representations of that same linear data. Additionally, BrainPaint extracts a new metric on the complexity of the EEG and feeds that back visually in a language the brain functions in. Acording to its creator, "our brains and BrainPaint are complex systems -- BrainPaint takes information communicated directly from the brain and creates real-time fractal images that the brain appears to understand."
Posted by rsk at September 6, 2007 09:41 AM