UCSD - University of California - San Diego

07/28/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 07/28/2026 16:45

UC San Diego Team Awarded $50K to Explore Connections Between Art and Neuroscience

Published Date

July 28, 2026

Article Content

Does experiencing art have the capacity to quiet an overactive mind and inspire a state of awe? An audio artist, neuroscientist and visual designer at the University of California San Diego have teamed up to find out. Their unique project, called "The Known and Unknown Mind," is taking shape with $50K in private support from the Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation.

"As an artist with ADHD, I empathize with people who have differently working brains," shared Bobby McElver, associate professor of Theatre and Dance and lead artist on the project. "This art installation is being designed to help people encounter states of awe, wonder and transcendence, and will react in real-time to each individual participant via a brain-computer interface."

McElver is collaborating with Ying Choon Wu, a cognitive neuroscientist at UC San Diego's Institute for Neural Computation who studies how brain states shape computational creativity, and Tommy Sharkey, a mixed-background designer and developer at UC San Diego's Design Lab with a background in XR remote collaboration, embodied cognition and speculative design.

Their project proposal was selected from more than 3,300 submissions to the Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation's inaugural grant program - which seeks to advance dialogue on meditation, psychology, creativity and collective engagement as pathways to global harmony and health.

A touch of magic: sound holograms and virtual butterflies

Art, science and engineering are converging in the design of the installation. Visitors will be immersed in a three-dimensional sound and visual environment, enveloped by sound holograms with hyper-specific precision - hearing intimate sounds like the light flutter of a butterfly's wings. The landscape will change in real time based on signals from an electroencephalogram (EEG) device each participant will wear to measure their brain's electrical activity.

McElver, who is head of the sound design area within the Theatre and Dance Design MFA program, often builds his own tools to answer the sonic questions he poses. One such system he has engineered is a Wave Field Synthesis loudspeaker array that uses hundreds of speakers to create sound holograms that move through space, producing intimate and highly precise spatial listening experiences.

In "The Known and Unknown Mind," McElver is investigating what happens in the brain when the act of listening is interrupted by internal distraction, and how that attention can be regained. "By making meditative attention visible, audible and shared, our project bridges psychology, contemplative practice and artistic creation as mutually reinforcing tools for understanding the mind," said McElver.

From left to right: Bobby McElver, Ying Choon Wu and Tommy Sharkey
Example of a passive brain-computer interface (BCI) system for near-real time modulation of sound and video. Pre-processing and feature analysis are performed on multi-channel EEG in near real-time to evaluate and modulate cortical sensitivity to audiovisual features.

McElver's audio landscape will be synchronized with a visually striking three-dimensional natural scene. Designer Tommy Sharkey is thinking about the narrative of the work, what each person will see, how the environment will respond to their presence and what mark they will leave behind for the next person.

He is experimenting with tactics that will captivate, keeping the default mode network of participants' brains - a network implicated in mind wandering, rumination, and self-referential thinking - temporarily muted to enable a sense of peace and joy. Each person will generate a unique holographic butterfly using features of their EEG and spoken reflections, which will be added to a "butterfly wall" that future visitors will experience, lending a sense of collective creativity.

"This landscape has a little touch of magic sprinkled in that I am extremely excited for," said Sharkey. "As participants engage with the art and divest from their internal monologue, the sound and visuals become more beautiful and detailed; if they drift back into their personal thoughts, the scene will begin to change to bring their focus back to the art."

Investigating the neuroscience of awe and wonder

Each visitor to the installation will have a completely unique visual and auditory experience driven by their own brain waves through a brain-computer interface. McElver, Wu and Sharkey aim to help visitors reach a meditative state by adapting different parameters in real time, from the sound intensity to complexity of landscape transformation and quantity of virtual butterflies.

This intersection between neuroscience and aesthetic engagement drives Wu's work. In a recent co-authored paper, she and her colleagues explored the therapeutic similarities between virtual reality experiences and psychedelics: "This approach opens up exciting possibilities for developing effective VR therapies that can enhance cognitive flexibility and reduce depressive symptoms in a manner comparable to that of psychedelic treatments, but without the associated risks and side effects."

Wu has been eager to collaborate with McElver since she first visited his Wave Field Synthesis lab. "Much of my prior experience in studying aesthetic experience has involved visual art, but Bobby's work opens a whole new horizon of possibilities in the auditory domain," she shared.

"While our primary goal is to create an art experience, I am very curious to study how EEG-guided spatialized sound - either alone or paired with visual scenes - can elicit an altered state of consciousness," Wu added.

The use of brain-computer interface technology in art installations is still emerging, and the Bobby Anspach Studio Foundation grant will enable the trio to further explore what is possible. "This is a make-or-break award for us," said McElver. "Rather than simply dreaming of the technology needed to realize our vision, this support gives us the opportunity to create truly personalized experiences that aspire to transcendence, inspire new research, and leave a lasting impact on audiences."

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A visitor experiences a sound hologram at the School of Arts and Humanities' Night of Research and Creative Activities event. Photo by Hana Tobias.
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