An Exploration of the Aesthetic Experience of Thought: Utilizing Biosensory Data to Visualize Cognitive Processes of Performance

The motivation from this project stems from an interest generated in the question, “What do performers think about?” This stream of thought led to preliminary research on how cognition and performance are linked, which finally led to the discovery of a study conducted between the University of Maryland and the University of Houston, where the brain activity of multiple dancers was analyzed during specific performanced-based tasks (Kohn, 2014). The article describes a key interest point of this research being to understand “the broader question of how the brain turns electrical signals into movement” (Kohn, 2014) . A large inhibition to such research until the past decade or so was the lack of mobile, low-load neurological sensors that could perform data collection without limiting the motion of participants - a recent development which has led to a new field of study in wearable computing (Kohn, 2014). Biological Psychology Professor Klaus Garmann puts it best, stating:

“If we really want to understand how the brain works, we need to have subjects who move naturally. Cognition is closely linked to movement and action.”

This research concluded that multiple areas of the brain are being engaged when dancers perform, and as such this experiment was guided to a natural set of questions:

How could one visualize such layered data streams in an abstract but meaningful way? And how would such data differ across genres of dance, if at all? Does a ballerina “think” differently from a hip-hop dancer? In what ways could an audience be effectively engaged by offering insights into the minds of dancers, through an auditory-visual experience?