Chair: As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor Jane Grant
2nd Chair: Dr. John Matthias

Rather than con­sid­er­ing the aes­thet­ics of art and music as a way of ap­proach­ing an un­der­stand­ing of per­cep­tion and brain func­tion, Neu­roArts em­pha­sizes the di­rect use of Neu­ro­sci­en­tific mod­els and ma­te­ri­als in artis­tic prac­tice. In Neu­roArts, neu­rons and neu­ronal mod­els are ex­am­ined out­side of the body/brain em­pha­siz­ing an artis­tic-en­gi­neer­ing ap­proach with ei­ther the phys­i­cal ma­te­r­ial of brain, or the adap­ta­tion of bi­o­log­i­cal mod­els of spik­ing neu­rons. In using mod­els of spik­ing neu­rons within art, sound and music, the in­ter­nal struc­ture of the brain be­comes ex­ter­nal, its plas­tic­ity ex­posed, its path­ways and net­works mal­leable. This gives us a stand­point from which to crit­i­cally en­gage and ques­tion multi-scale con­cepts such as the im­por­tance of the cell, net­work topol­ogy and plas­tic­ity, self-hood, mem­ory and con­scious­ness.

The first In­ter­na­tional Neu­roArts con­fer­ence out­lin­ing the new sub­ject area which took place in Feb­ru­ary 2011 at Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth.

Neu­roArts at ISEA de­vel­ops key themes from the first In­ter­na­tional Neu­roArts Con­fer­ence, and will con­sider two main themes: 

Philoso­phies of scale within Neu­roArts: from the scale of the sin­gle cell to the meso­scopic scale of brain em­u­la­tions through to emer­gent large-scale phe­nom­ena in­clud­ing self-hood and con­scious­ness. 

What are the re­la­tion­ships be­tween plas­tic­ity, stim­u­la­tion and fir­ing pat­terns in small brain cir­cuits? And, how can their adap­ta­tion in artis­tic pro­jects along­side synap­tic plas­tic­ity, and cel­lu­lar topolo­gies be ex­ploited to make adap­tive art?

We hope that the ex­plo­rations of these themes will help to de­fine the bound­aries of this new sub­ject within an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary en­vi­ron­ment.

Paper Ab­stracts

Agency in a Dish- Sup­posed a Semi-Liv­ing Brain be Art (Maker)

by Oron Catts

In the year 2000 The Sym­bi­ot­icA Re­search Group (SARG) em­barked on a pro­ject that in­tended to cul­tur­ally scru­ti­nise the pos­si­bil­ity of em­body­ing en­gi­neered neuro-as­sem­blies. The idea that neu­rons cul­tured over elec­trodes can act in the world, and that the world would have a di­rect af­fect on the neu­rons, sug­gest that with in­creased com­plex­ity these en­gi­neered neuro-as­sem­blies will re­quire eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion.

This paper will de­scribe the con­cept of the semi-liv­ing, in par­tic­u­lar that which re­spond;  Neu­ronal tis­sue can be cul­tured and grown in­de­pen­dently from the con­text of the bi­o­log­i­cal body and then en­gage in rudi­men­tary two way in­for­ma­tion ex­change with the world around it.  Some of the main is­sues that this no­tion raise will be ex­plored by fol­low­ing the tra­jec­tory of the neu­ro­engi­neer­ing re­lated re­search at Sym­bi­ot­icA - from SARG's Fish & Chips to Neu­rot­ica's Silent Bar­rage.

Be­tween a thing and a thought – the neu­ropsy­chol­ogy of self­hood

by Paul Broks

Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy is com­ing of age. Tra­di­tional ‘le­sion stud­ies’ - the painstak­ing method of ob­serv­ing the ef­fects of lo­calised brain dam­age on be­hav­iour – have been aug­mented by brain imag­ing tech­nolo­gies al­low­ing di­rect ob­ser­va­tion of the liv­ing brain. We are now build­ing maps of the brain’s func­tional ar­chi­tec­ture that, in scope and de­tail, could scarcely have been imag­ined 50 years ago.

And yet, it seems to me, some­thing fun­da­men­tal is miss­ing from the scene. Where is the ‘per­son’? Where is the ‘self’? How do the var­i­ous sys­tems and sub­sys­tems of men­tal­ity (per­cep­tion, mem­ory, emo­tion, etc.) col­lude in the con­struc­tion and main­te­nance of the con­scious, in­tro­spec­tive, uni­fied and con­tin­u­ous sense of in­di­vid­ual iden­tity that we take as the bedrock norm of human ex­pe­ri­ence? Until re­cently such ques­tions were sim­ply not on the sci­en­tific agenda. 

They are now, and as this cen­tury un­folds the neu­ropsy­chol­ogy of per­son­hood is going to stir up ques­tions of pro­found con­cern not merely for neu­ro­science but for so­ci­ety at large. In this pre­sen­ta­tion I offer my own, some­times per­sonal, re­flec­tions on the neu­ropsy­chol­ogy of self­hood from the per­spec­tive of a sci­en­tist-prac­ti­tioner with a back­ground in clin­i­cal neu­ropsy­chol­ogy, but one who also has lately spent as much time ex­plor­ing mem­ory and iden­tity through the­atre and film. 

Neural Ghosts and The Focus of At­ten­tion

by As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor  Jane Grant

Con­scious­ness as at­ten­tion to mem­ory is a term that neu­ro­sci­en­tist Eu­gene Izhike­vich uses to de­scribe a phe­nom­e­non in which the cor­tex re-lives or re-vis­its a spe­cific pat­tern of neural ac­tiv­ity in the ab­sence of sen­sory in­for­ma­tion. The model brain or cor­tex, de­prived of stim­u­la­tion, jour­neys around its own tem­po­ral ar­chi­tec­tures con­jur­ing past ‘ex­pe­ri­ences’ or ‘mem­o­ries’, pulling them into the pre­sent. Ev­i­dence that these path­ways con­tinue to be re-vis­ited once stim­u­la­tion oc­curs again is com­pelling.

Re­fer­ring to re­cent re­search in de­vel­op­ing the sonic art­work Ghost, and two ear­lier works: Thresh­old and The Frag­mented Or­ches­tra, all of which have at their core the Spike Tim­ing De­pen­dant Plas­tic­ity model of Eu­gene Izhike­vich, I will dis­cuss the phe­nom­ena of ‘sonic ghosts’ a term I have used to de­scribe the buffer­ing up of the neural past with the neural pre­sent.
 

The Sound of Small Brain Cir­cuits: Plas­tic­ity and Syn­chro­ni­sa­tion in the Neu­ro­gran­u­lar Sam­pler

by As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor John Matthias

The Neu­ro­gran­u­lar Sam­pler is a soft­ware mu­si­cal in­stru­ment de­signed by a col­lab­o­ra­tive team, which trig­gers grains of live sam­pled audio when any one of a net­work of ar­ti­fi­cial spik­ing neu­rons ‘fires’. The level of syn­chro­ni­sa­tion in dis­trib­uted sys­tems is often con­trolled by the strength of in­ter­ac­tion be­tween the in­di­vid­ual el­e­ments. If the el­e­ments are neu­rons in small brain cir­cuits, the char­ac­ter­is­tic event is the ‘fir­ing time’ of a par­tic­u­lar neu­ron. The syn­chrony or de­cou­pling of these char­ac­ter­is­tic events is con­trolled by mod­i­fi­ca­tions in the strength of the con­nec­tions be­tween neu­rons under the in­flu­ence of spike tim­ing de­pen­dent plas­tic­ity, which adapts the strengths of neu­ronal con­nec­tions ac­cord­ing to the rel­a­tive fir­ing times of con­nected neu­rons.

In this paper we will show how we can ‘neu­ro­engi­neer’ the col­lec­tive fir­ing be­hav­iour of small net­works of ar­ti­fi­cial neu­rons by ex­ploit­ing spike tim­ing de­pen­dent plas­tic­ity rules in a sonic con­text.

Mod­els of Spik­ing Neu­rons

by As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor Mag­nus Richard­son

Start­ing with the work of Gal­vani in the 18th cen­tury and end­ing with mod­ern, su­per-com­puter ap­proaches, this talk aims to give an overview of the ba­sics of how neu­rons un­der­lie the nat­ural com­pu­ta­tion that takes place in the ner­vous sys­tem. I will cover some of the tech­niques that have been used for mea­sur­ing ac­tiv­ity in the ner­vous sys­tem at dif­fer­ent spa­tial and tem­po­ral scales, how it came to be thought that neu­rons are the basic com­pu­ta­tional unit of the brain, how in­for­ma­tion flows through neu­rons and how neu­rons wire to­gether to form synapses - the chang­ing strengths of which are thought to rep­re­sent the stor­age of mem­o­ries. The talk will end with a dis­cus­sion of some re­cent spec­u­la­tive the­o­ries of how the neo­cor­tex  - the brain re­gion where our high level thought processes take place – might work.

Source: