‘The Great Gig in the Mind’ - Part 2

Back in October of last year our patient Mark took part in a Pollen Music Group experiment looking at the overlap of art and science, by studying brain wave patterns in relation to familiar song exposure. You can read all about the experiment itself here, and now we are excited to share the outcome!

Listeners were exposed to the Dolby Atmos mix of Great Gig in the Sky by Pink Floyd, and their EEG responses were recorded using a scalp electrode array. The four activity pattern categories measured were;

🧐 Interest

💆‍♂ Relaxation

😡 Stress

😄 Excitement

In this video you can see Mark's brain activity correlated to the music, as visualised by a shifting landscape of clouds and twinkling stars. Each change in this landscape represents varying regions of elevated cortical activation. Whilst our video shows only our patients' response to the tune, the overall goal of the experiment has been to create an immersive exhibit collated from all the participants data – dubbed 'the Brainstorms project'.

At this future exhibit people will be able to see in real time their individual neural response to pieces of music, and the initial data collected here will help inform the parameters of an exciting new project going forward.

Thanks to Mark for sharing his experience with us, and we look forward to hearing more about the immersive experiential exhibit when it comes to fruition. You can see the raw data used to extrapolate his video-visualizer below.