How can we maintain healthy brains and what connections can we make that might be beneficial to both human and planetary health? These two key questions were teased out on the middle day of three during the recent inspiring Creative Brain Week gathering of scientists and artists in Trinity College Dublin.
The annual programme, which is devised by cultural producer Dominic Campbell on behalf of the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) and Creative Ageing International, attracts neuroscientists, arts and health researchers and practitioners from all over the world to Dublin. The goal of the GBHI teams at the University of California in San Francisco and TCD is to promote education, policy change and evidence-based interventions to reduce the scale and impact of dementia worldwide.
In this context, Creative Brain Week becomes a platform to showcase some of the projects which can protect brain health across the lifespan. My Brain Robbie, an education programme for children on brain health was one of the projects highlighted this year. Developed by Dr Eleonore Bayen, neurologist and director of the neuro-rehabilitation laboratory at the Sorbonne University in Paris, it teaches children the eight protective practices for brain health — be social, be active, be a lifelong learner, have a good diet, avoid harmful substances, mind your health, sleep well and avoid head injuries.
“This programme empowers children to have simple healthy lifestyles to protect their brains throughout their lives,” explains Bayen. By improving lifestyle, educational and environmental (eg reduce air pollution) factors and treating chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, the amount of dementia in communities can be reduced by up to 40 per cent, she adds.
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Three primary schools in Dublin piloted the My Brain Robbie programme and demonstrated their learning through drama, art and videos during the event. The classroom resources from mybrainrobbie.org are available for free for primary schoolteachers who would like to incorporate the programme into their health and wellbeing modules.
Lorina Naci, associate professor at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience and the GBHI says that connections are so important from the biomedical perspective to protect the brain. “Social disengagement leads to isolation, mental health problems, loneliness and dementia. And while brain health might not mean much for younger age groups, making it important for young people is powerful. We all saw how devastating it was to lose the web of interconnections during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Other themes explored were how technologies such as mixed reality games (experienced through headsets, these games augment reality and embed it in the space you are in) and virtual reality can actually enhance connections between people and with the natural world — rather than disconnect us from each other and the planet as you might expect.
Mads Haahr, founder and chief executive of Random.org and Haunted Planet Studios and associate professor at TCD School of Computers spoke about the potential of mixed reality games using synaesthesia (where you can experience different senses simultaneously). Working with musician, composer and researcher, Svetlana Rudenko, Haahr showed how these so-called serious games can show how musical compositions can be experienced visually. Rudenko suggested these games could be a promising new tool to enhance the mental ability of vulnerable clinical groups.
Roman Romero-Ortuno, professor of medical gerontology at TCD agreed that multisensory integration can increase with ageing (eg we can hear what we see and see what we hear). Such games might be useful in nursing homes and hospital settings to promote brain health among those impacted by stress and boredom,” he suggests.
Artist Barnaby Churchill Steel, founder and director of Marshmallow Laser Feast, brought the theme of connection to a whole other level with his virtual reality exploration of “inter-being” and inter-existence”. These immersive experiences — which audience members could sample in a pop-up laboratory in TCD — challenge our normal perceptions through a captivating visual experience of human physiology (allowing us to watch digital reconstructions of the internal mechanisms of breathing air into our lungs or the blood flowing through our bodies) and tantalising imagery of the natural world (seeing the world from the perspective of a dragonfly, an owl or a mosquito).
Churchill Steel says that part of the motivation behind these immersive experiences is to lead people to a “profound re-evaluation of our ecological embeddedness”.
“I’m interested in the experience of observing scientific research. Our realities shaped by technology can expand our perceptions and create a perspective shift that sticks with you afterwards,” he says.
He shows the audience videos of people with virtual reality headsets, moss-covered helmets and backpacks which vibrate like buzzing dragonflies as they look at the world from the perspective of other species. He speaks about how these entrancing experiences can show people the relationships between flowers and pollinators and how the sunlight is woven into glucose inside a plant.
Churchill Steel suggests that science is telling us ancient wisdom from a different perspective. “By making the invisible visible, it brings a sense of awe and wonder,” he says.
“We are positioned in our bodies looking out with a focus around the head. And while that’s true [reality], other sensory experiences bring us a richness that tells us other stories and allow us to experience certain narratives that science tells us is true. What virtual reality can do is expand our perceptions to make other narratives visible. You could call them scientific hallucinations,” he says.
Describing one of the virtual reality experiences, he adds: “You can see how a tree is more like a river estuary and how its golden glucose is feeding the food web. By making the bark of a tree transparent, you can think of the tree as a lung of the planet. Seeing a tree in constant motion and exchange gives a perspective shift so you can explore it as an extension of your own [breathing] body and you become tied in a relationship with it.”
Quoting the American environmental journalist, author and academic Michael Pollan, Churchill Steel says Pollan once said that looking at the world from another species’ point of view is the cure for the disease of human self-importance.
But, he also says that when we share the natural world like this, there is a human connection that remains. “When the headsets come off, all prejudices fall away and we move beyond race, age and gender.”
So far, Marshmallow Laser Feast has mounted exhibitions in galleries and has plans to release videos in App stores. “There are also possibilities of its use in education as thinking of yourself as a fluid organism will shape the way children think about their bodies,” he says.
It begs the question of whether giving people access to these new doors to alternative perceptions will encourage a more respectful attitude toward each other and all species on the planet. Churchill Steel suggests this technology allows us to step out of the boundaries to experience greater empathy and imagination. “If your health is tied to the forest, stream and oceans, that will mean that your self-care extends to the planet. Telling this story of interrelationships is really what motivates me.”
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