Brain, technology and creativity : BrainArt : a BCI-based entertainment tool to enact creativity and create drawing from cerebral rhythms

The present article presents a high-level study on creativity. From a theoretical point of view, we conceptualized cognitive framework of creativity based on the notion of balance between conscious and unconscious processes. Indeed, creativity may be considered a borderline state of mind, in which the thought seems to fluctuate in a near-consciousness state. When the idea arises to the consciousness, the mind turns back to its previous equilibrium, and divergent thinking is replaced by canonical thinking. Starting with this framework, we designed and developed an entertainment application, in which creativity is enacted by unconscious processes, but in collaboration with conscious motivation. Our aim was then to activate a new, dedicated balance between conscious and unconscious processes, in order to obtain a state of mind similar to the spontaneous creative process, but directly guided by brain activity without the intervention of verbal and semantic modulations. We developed BrainArt, which is essentially a workbench that allows users to create drawing using their own cerebral rhythms, that are then collected by a commercial BCI device. The application gave us the possibility to observe and analyze the spontaneous creative expression of the participants’ insight during an experimental session, where users created an artwork using the application. Therefore, this work presents both the BrainArt application possibility for entertainment and freedom to express individual conscious and unconscious creative insight, as well as the preliminary experimental results obtained by a combined approach of statistical, signal and behavioral analysis.