Inside Thoughts

Inside Thoughts is an active 3D-LED sculpture that provides a unique experience to visualize thoughts, feelings, sensations, and decision-making inside a transparent brain and down the spinal cord. We have used LEDs in resin and silicone to generate a representative human brain and spinal cord that can be split and viewed inside and out, thus allowing the audience to walk through an active brain model that expresses activity related to a range of human feelings, decision making, and somatosensory processing. This piece allows an inside-out embodied experience of our internal thoughts played out on a transparent brain and ultimately allows the audience to reflect on how our neuronal activity sustains our being.

As no 3D active and transparent models of the brain delineate the experience of seeing in real time what our brains are doing inside our heads, I set out to make one. The first part of this project demarks the creation of an LED-controlled resin and silicone sculpture, shown here. In the near future, this sculpture will be connected to an EEG headset that will enable visualizing experienced and live thoughts inside our brain in real-time on a 3D life-size transparent model of a brain.

The piece takes you through four events of a human brain processing pain, empathy, dreaming with memory recall, and death. The sculpture mimics the activity of the spinal cord and brain during the physical pain of touching something hot with both hands and juxtaposes it to the observed similar brain activity during empathy recall. The second pair of contrasted events follow the brain and spinal cord activity of a body in the process of dying, during and after breathing and heart beating stop, and in juxtaposition the brain activity during dreaming with a side of memory recall.  I invite the viewer to see these thoughts played outside their bodies on a transparent brain, and, through the view of this model, also to question their philosophical constructs of death, dreaming/memory recall, pain, and empathy.

Follow the link below for detailed information on the brain and spinal cord activity represented in the sculpture.