Carnegie Mellon University — The Arts in Society Conference (2025)
Example portrait exemplifying network nodes and thematic-sentiment relationships. Left: Portrait of participants. Right: Representational network consisting of explicit and implicit entities. Middle: Excerpts from the interview session associated with the node entity and portrait. Bottom: Heatmap visualizing z-scores from a Chi-Square Test of Independence (theme × sentiment) relationships. Positive z-scores reflect sentiment–theme pairings that occurred more than expected; negative z-scores reflect underrepresentation. Values ≥ |1.96| indicate statistical significance.
Exploring how neuroscience, art, and AI reveal the hidden networks linking our brains, communities, and digital environments.
At Carnegie Mellon University’s Arts in Society Conference (2025), neuroscientist and artist Joshua Sariñana, PhD, presented Mental Mapping: The Art of Exploring Connections. This project combines neuroscience, art, and AI to visualize the hidden systems that shape cognition, community, and technology.
Drawing on his ongoing public art initiative, Mental Mapping, Sariñana illustrated how internal neural patterns, social ties, and virtual networks mirror each other. Using AI-assisted thematic and sentiment analysis, portrait photography, and local storytelling, the work reveals how disconnection—ecological, social, or cognitive—can lead to collapse, and how reconnection fosters resilience and understanding.
The presentation emphasized that creativity emerges where disciplines converge—between neuroscience and art, data and empathy—and invited audiences to see cognitive networks as both abstractions and living systems that sustain culture and consciousness