NEW YORK – On one of those high-isolation days during the pandemic, neuroscientist Pia-Kelsey O’Neill, PhD, sat in her apartment placing the final touches on a homemade electroencephalogram (EEG) recorder. She gently attached electrodes of the EEG to her scalp and hit the record button.

“In the beginning my eyes were closed and I felt calm and relaxed,” recalled Dr. O’Neill, a postdoc in the Salzman lab at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. “Then I opened my eyes and started reading.” 

A normal EEG recording would have appeared as a jagged trace with peaks and valleys of varying sizes and densities. But Dr. O’Neill used her engineering skills to hack the recorder into a device that generates art directly from a person’s brain waves. 

“My brain’s transition, from a meditative state to a more active one, is seen here as a graceful digital form that changes from blue to orange,” she said. 

Dr. O’Neill mastered electrophysiology techniques as a graduate student when she studied brain regions that help mice remember locations. In her current research, she studies the amygdala, a brain region that helps link emotions such as fear and joy to cognitive functions like recollection and decision-making. 

Her foray into artistic visualization of brain data resides in the importance she places in sharing her scientific research and discoveries with different audiences. Helping here is a grant from the Dana Foundation, which will enable her to develop inexpensive EEG recorders for general use.

“Integrating the methods and aesthetics of an artistic approach helps me communicate scientific findings more clearly to both science enthusiasts and the scientists with whom I regularly work,” she said.