Brain Experience by Baihan Lin

Which brain regions light up at which moments when seeing images or listening to music? And inversely what does the brain imagine seeing or hearing given certain types of neural responses? These questions have intrigued people for centuries and motivated neuroscientists and philosophers to study the relationship between mind and body in various senses: seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling. Despite all these efforts, the functions of different components in the brain remain mostly a mystery. In Brain Experience, data visualization enables users to experience how human brains perform complicated tasks that appear easy to us. The mechanisms and processes beneath it, surprisingly, are highly complex and involve many organic elements. The project can help the users unravel these beautiful mysteries. We create an educational experience that guides the readers to comprehend the neural processes of the brain performing cognitive tasks such as seeing images or listening to music, and learn about what neuroscientists study. The project first introduces the foundations of the perception process of the brains with visual storytelling and then visualizes the dynamic process of how different brain regions interact to perform these cognitive tasks. Through this journey, readers can better understand how the human brains process information in an organized, systematic and hierarchical way. They will perceive the underlying neural mechanisms behind seemingly daily tasks, arrive at the research frontiers of cognitive and computational neuroscience, and revisit their philosophical stances of life about how our consciousness and thinking processes are formed.