BRAINLAND

In this conversation poet and visual artist Andrea Mbarushimana and neurologist/poet Heather Angus-Leppan talk about their project exploring the value of chatbots to help people cope with and better understand their epilepsy. The project began by collecting over 1700 questions about the condition posted by people living with epilepsy. Heather describes how Andrea was integral to the project, facilitating workshops with people living epilepsy. Andrea shares poems written during the project, including

Peter Vuust is that rare combintion - a professional musician and composer, and a professor of neuroscience investigating how our brain responds to music. This wide ranging conversation includes why we humans are so attracted and responsive to music, the link between groove and predictive cognition, the Mozart effect, the tingle/chill factor in music, and how to get more out of atonal music. As if that weren’t enough, Peter shares a track of his upcoming album (he can be seen and heard in several

Those animated objects, puppets, can work powerfully on our emotions and generate empathy, seemingly tapping into some very basic part of our psyche and, perhaps, neurology. Which is the main reason why we are devoting two podcasts to this subject. In this podcast Claudia Orenstein, a leading authority on puppets and physical theatre worldwide discusses the various ways objects are deployed in performance, including their use in ritual, education and entertainment, for adults as well as children. A

Since completing her degree in interactive art 30 years ago Luciana Haill has worked at the cutting edge of the field. She recounts how childhood meningitis got her interested in the brain and Grey Walter's 'The Living Brain' the EEG - she sold her car in order to buy a portable EEG recorder, her tool for exploring the boundary of consciousness.More recently, her obsession with lost historical artefacts led her to create the Arts Council funded 'Apparitions' app- the app recreates lost landmarks