USC Unveils New Brain and Creativity Institute

A ribbon-cutting ceremony took place Tuesday to unveil the Brain and Creativity Institute in Dornsife Neuroscience Pavilion. 

The center will combine neuroscience with "what it means to be human" projects. The building makes a case that artists, scientists and theorists need one another. 

Projects include a collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to research how intense music training affects brain development in children. 

They will follow children who are six years old and encountering musical training for the first time and follow them for five years in the LA Philharmonic. 

"Poets and novelists have been after these same questions in all the time we have been on earth," said Antonio Damasio, the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute. "As scientists, we're trying to understand the same deep issues."

Dana and David Dornsife provided a large amount of the funding for the building. The 20,000-square-feet building features science labs and performance space side by side, anchored by advanced neuroimaging machines and a world-class concert hall.

The J. Cammilleri Hall was designed by Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician also responsible for the Walt Disney Concert Hall along with other top performance halls worldwide. 

Other parts of the building are filled with laboratories, EEG and MRI machines, and high resolution, real-time brain scans. 

"We wanted to persuade people go back and forth across these worlds, and to help them see how these worlds interconnect," said Damasio, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "It's important for science and the humanities to work together and to do so manifestly."

Other projects the center will research is how the brain processes emotions such as compassion and gratitude, and how the brain generates feelings of pain, sadness and joy. They will also collaborate with the Viterbi School of Engineering.