Creative Brain Week 2024: Attention, Connection, Love

Creative Brain Week is an annual pioneering event that illustrates innovation at the intersection of arts and brain science, including creative approaches to health. The themes for 2024 are Attention, Connection and Love, explored through arts, neuroscience, and their application. All events are free, and take place both online and in person.

A Global Brain Health Institute innovation at Trinity College Dublin, Creative Brain Week is presented in association with the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), and with support from Creative Ireland and the Atlantic Institute.

Monday 4 March: Opening Session
Monday’s prologue event will celebrate activity inspired by or developing from Creative Brain Week 2023, and will set the scene for the week ahead. Speakers include Ian Robertson, Founding Director of the Global Brain Health Institute and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin; Professor Brian Lawlor, Conolly Norman Professor of Old Age Psychiatry, and Site Director of the Global Brain Health Institute; and Dominic Campbell, Co-founder of Creative Aging International.

Tuesday 5 March: Attention
How does attention work, what do people pay attention to, what happens as attention changes? Speakers include Tanisha Hill-Jarrett, neuropsychologist and Assistant Professor, Memory and Aging Centre, University of California San Francisco, and Susan Magsamen, founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, Pedersen Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

There will be a panel discussion on Living with an Acquired Brain Injury in Ireland, featuring clinicians with lived experience of ABI, and a session exploring the mind of the extreme swimmer.

Wednesday 6 March: Connection
How are people connected and what to? What connections do people ignore and can connections be nurtured? The morning session will explore ‘Technology, Storytelling, Connection, Health’. Contributors include Barnaby Churchill Steel of Marshmallow Laser Feast, an experiential art collective whose work reinterprets the idea of human perception and experience.

The panel discussion ‘Collaboration and Connection’ will feature contributors from Jameel Arts and Health Lab and Lancet authors who have been working in collaboration to articulate the measurable impact of arts and creativity on non-communicable diseases, as part of the WHO–Lancet Global Series on the Health Benefits of the Arts. The final session explores ‘Serious Games, Music, Synaesthesia, and Brain Health’.

Thursday 7 March: Love (and when it isn’t enough)
How do neuroscientists and artists understand love, and is love enough to build global systems of care? The morning session examines the difference between our individual experience of love manifested as care, and the challenges arising when that is scaled to a national, or international perspective.

In the afternoon, Made from Love is a suite of case studies suggesting how a loving marriage between neuroscience-informed care and creativity may nurture the evolved systems of healthcare of the future. Projects include Keepsake Chronicles, a collaboration between Kate Irving, Professor of Clinical Nursing at Dublin City University, Peruvian photographer Alex Kornhuber, Irish poet Cathy Fowley, and people living with dementia.

4 – 9 March: Creative & Associate Programme
Living Labs daily at 12.15pm invite you to explore creativity as knowledge-making practice while a week-long exhibition reflects the vibrancy of national and international creative work.

Other events include Neuroscience Meets Dance in Therapy (Friday 8 March – online) and An Introduction to IMMA Horizons: Lifelong Creativity for the Curious at IMMA (Friday 8 March at IMMA).

March to April – Various Dates: Satellites
GBHI colleagues from Australia, Botswana, Egypt and India will lead inaugural Creative Brain Weeks in their own countries.

Booking information 
In person events take place in the Naughton Institute, Trinity College Dublin, and are fully ticketed. Tickets are free but have to be booked in advance to guarantee a place. Online booking options are also available. Book at creativebrainweek.com