Creative Brain Week 2026: Singapore

Navigating the social world requires humans to mentally represent their own internal states, others’ internal states, the relationship between them and its mediation through external signals, social context and cultural norms. In this interactive workshop, we will explore two key topics in social cognition that facilitate such processes: Interoception and Double Empathy.

Interoception is the sensation of internal signals in the body which provides us with information about our own emotional state. Feeling your heart palpitate and stomach somersault might indicate that you are experiencing love or perhaps fear. In social situations, we often have access to the same external information as others, but we can never sense directly what they feel inside or always know how such signals are intended or interpreted.

The concept of Double Empathy acknowledges that understanding is a bi-directional process, and communication between people with vastly different ways of being in the world can be challenging. The contextual and complex way in which we understand ourselves and others means our culture and past experiences influence how we interpret what we feel.

Together we will explore research insights, interactive experiments, and a discussion on the barriers to and benefits of human connection.

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About the facilitator

Dr Jane Conway is a PI and Lecturer at the School of Psychology, University of Galway. She established the Scientific Arts Lab in 2023 as a mechanism for exploring the connection between art and science and co-directs Project RARE: Real Art and Research for Everyone.

Jane completed her training as an experimental psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neuroscience, King’s College London. She investigates the cognitive mechanisms behind how people mentally represent abstract aspects of the world and how these are influenced by cultural context and social environment.

Her work concerns the socio-cognitive ability to represent others’ minds and their mental states, and she is especially interested in studying individual differences in this ability. An applied aspect of her research aims to improve accessibility in arts and cultural spaces for neurodivergent people. [/accordion]

This interactive workshop bridges cognitive science and hands-on problem solving, exploring how tactile, 3D motor skill games such as the Rubik's cube stimulate neuroplasticity.

​Whether you are an academic, a student or simply curious about brain health, you will discover the neurological mechanics behind cognitive resilience. We will dive into how manipulating 3D motor puzzles acts as a rigorous workout for the brain, enhancing focus, spatial awareness and mental adaptability.

Walk away with practical, neuroscience based strategies to actively strengthen your mind through continuous, structured engagement, beginning with a single session and continuing in fifteen minutes a day.

Cubes and all learning materials are provided, and no experience is needed.

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About the facilitator

Paula Zheng is a master's student and student researcher at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, in a joint programme with the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine. Her field is the Science of Learning, the interdisciplinary meeting point of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and education, which examines how the human brain physically encodes, processes and retains information, and applies those biological insights to cognitive development, memory retention and practical learning strategies.

​Her work centres on cognitive reserve, neuroplasticity and intrinsic motivation: why sustained, effortful novelty builds a buffer against age-related decline, and how the brain's reward system can be deliberately designed rather than waited for. She teaches this as a three-part public lecture, Reshaping Learning Power.

​Her authority comes from living the science as a lifelong learner: she took up cognitive and memory training at 32, learned to solve the Rubik's cube at 35, and is today one of the few women in Singapore who can solve one blindfolded. She founded KogniPlay to turn that practice into method, an intergenerational programme that teaches the Rubik's cube as cognitive training for families, schools and seniors.

Everyone is welcome without prior registration.

This first of Creative Brain Week Singapore 2026 field trips draws attention to how access and accessibility programming in cultural institutions can contribute to overall equity in brain health in Singapore.

From the neurodivergent to the non-sighted, from the young to the aged, Singapore Art Museum has been developing a suite of sensorily inclusive programmes and aesthetically elastic resources to make contemporary art and its appreciation a key catalyst for creative responsiveness and communal resilience.

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About the facilitator

Erica Lai is currently deputy director of programmes at the Singapore Art Museum, where she exercises her extensive experience in curatorial programming and art education with a commitment to advancing equitable art-making and art-thinking within Singapore, Southeast Asia and Asia.

During her previous tenure at the National Gallery Singapore, Erica served as assistant director of curatorial programmes, where she led curatorial programming for a diverse range of exhibitions and commissions of Southeast Asian and international artists, including Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America, Liu Kuo-Sung: Experimentation as Method, and Nam June Paik: The Future is Now.

Erica pioneered Southeast Asia’s first museum-led online learning initiative, leading the development of a MOOC focused on Southeast Asian art. This initiative offered global access to the museum’s collections and provided knowledge on the history, cultural significance and modern evolution of Southeast Asian art. Erica also advocated for and implemented diversity and inclusion programmes for museum staff.

Practice may make perfect, but the point is to exercise those newly acquired motor skills from Paula’s workshop in Day 2 for our neurons to fire in ways that keep our synapses elastic and reconfigurable, as much for brain health and mental resilience as for communal learning and social sustainability.

No prior registration is required for this 15-minute review. Just come by and drop in.

​In the blink of an eye, life changes forever for those who acquired a brain injury. Working in brain injury advocacy, one of the challenges we face is the invisible nature of brain injury.

​People often look fine physically but the cognitive, emotional and psychological impact of brain injury are largely hidden. The invisible nature often means that it is not properly understood or recognised. An acquired brain injury (ABI) often reduces the person’s ability to have their voice heard. Being an active agent in your own life becomes tricky.

As part of my policy advocacy work, I wanted to find a way that combined creative arts and advocacy, and explore how the creative arts could support increase the visibility of ABI. In the workshop I will share with you the ongoing work in Ireland. I will explore how, from a human rights perspective, its use to elevate voice, exercise agency and find a deeply authentic expression for the lived experience.

We will take time to explore together the dynamic interplay between creative arts as a tool to support brain health, promote equal participation and advocate for change.

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​About the facilitator

Gráinne is the director of policy and research with Acquired Brain Injury Ireland and a Global Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health, Trinity College Dublin.

Her work focuses on addressing health inequalities and championing the human rights of those facing exclusion due to disability and ageing.

Gráinne’s work has involved spear-heading several successful national policy advocacy campaigns to bring about policy change. She has led out on stakeholder engagement, building alliances and advocacy coalitions in the acquired brain injury community.

In recent years, Grainne has engaged in creative arts practices to elevate the voice, bring visibility and support the agency of people living with an acquired brain injury. This has included delivering events for Creative Brain Week, in Trinity College Dublin, Creative Brainwaves sessions in local councils and partnering with Brain Injury Matters (Northern IrelandI) on a variety of arts-based projects.

Grainne has an exemplary track record building collaborations with people with lived experience, academic institutions, researchers and NGOs on projects at national, European and international levels. In 2024, Gráinne was appointed an adjunct assistant professor at the Centre for Health Policy and Management, Trinity College Dublin.

Footsteps hastily quicken in the jostling city filled with people zooming from point A to B. Side eye glares if we bump into someone. Maybe an accidental stumble occurs. This can be quite unforgiving if an elderly takes a tumble.

​This workshop is about slowing down and connecting to our feet. Through a mindful walking exercise, we will place one foot in front of the other. As we step, we will bring attention to each footstep with care and gentle kindness. In our head we will observe and make note of every “step, step, step”. This is to quieten the mind and bring attention to the present.

​There are over 200,000 microscopic sensory nerve endings in the pair. The workshop’s aim is to knead the numbness out of it.

​By going barefoot, we will energise it with sensory play through tactile surfaces on the floor. To pay attention to the interruptions, criss cross patterns and lines of tape covering the floor. The foot will lead and be the guide. It will trace the lines of the tape and observe the textural differences. The stops, the gaps and the diagonals.

​Once more, we will feel the walking rhythm in our feet.

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About the facilitator

Liszu Tan is a Malaysian artist based between Kuala Lumpur and London. She has shown internationally in Somers Gallery in London, ATTA Gallery in Bangkok and with Supper House in Singapore. She was an artist-in-residence in the visual arts program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She holds a MA Sculpture from Royal College of Art and MA Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts.

Liszu's artwork crosses sculpture, performance and drawings. Often treating materials and objects like skin and bones. At times blending disappearing marks onto bodily surfaces. Extensions of her embodied Butoh gestures. She is fascinated by facets related to the body. From its inner workings to the moving body and the underlying politics that govern its presence in space.

She utilises the vocabulary of abstraction and gestures to create assemblages of objects that allude to narratives about the body’s relationship to space, time and memories. Stretchy morphing soft sculptures, liminal wood structure with hinge curtains, bouncing bowling ball. Her sculptures can be inhabited, interacted with and respond architecturally. She is also anosmic and works with scent, texture and disappearing colour to engage with this missing sensory input.

Everyone is welcome without prior registration.

Who is Two Cent Collective?
What does it seek to do?
Where is it active?
Which domains does it address?
And how does it make a difference in global brain health?

In this session, anGie seah and Will Dean, two founding members of Two Cent Collective, invite participants to hear from and play alongside them as they share the story of the Collective , an interdisciplinary group of Atlantic Fellows from the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) bringing together artistry and advocacy for creative ageing across Ireland and Singapore.

Together, they will introduce a project working with young people that uses art practice as a vehicle for brain health and expression, with a focus on the MEON exhibition and Gestures of Care—reflecting on what it has revealed about co-creating with young people and advancing equity in brain health through creative, cross-disciplinary practice.

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About the facilitators

anGie seah is a Singaporean artist whose multi-disciplinary practices span drawing, installation, performance, sculpture and video to respond to the human condition in relation to evolving social environments. Her penchant for immersive community-making flows from the ease with which she engages across different demographics, especially to give voice to and shape space for the vulnerable and the misunderstood.

anGie has exhibited extensively over the past two decades: from her studies in fine arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2000 to the Atlantic Fellowship that brought her to Trinity College Dublin in 2025-2026 to explore equity in brain health—alongside exhibitions, artist residences and festival presentations in Australia (Asialink/VCA), France (Palais de Tokyo, MAC Lyon, CITE Des Arts), Germany (ZKM Centre for New Media, Goethe Institute Berlin), and Japan (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum).

Will Dean is a dementia advocate, care partner and an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute in Trinity College Dublin. His lived experience caring for his mother, who lives with young onset dementia, grounds his work in the realities of navigating diagnosis, care and support systems and research participation as a family carer.

Will serves as PPI Lead on a Welsh Government-funded, co-produced, peer support programme for young dementia carers and works as a dementia advocate for national dementia organisations across the UK. His research and advocacy focus on stigma reduction, evidence-based dementia advocacy and young onset dementia - areas where families often face delayed diagnosis, limited age-appropriate support and the compounded challenge of navigating services designed around later-life dementia.

As a GBHI Fellow, Will continues to develop his leadership in public and patient involvement, working alongside researchers and clinicians to meaningfully embed the voices of people with lived experience of dementia into research design, from project-level co-production through to strategic, network-level engagement.

This second field trip of Creative Brain Week Singapore 2026 is presented in partnership with NTU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, where participants are invited to join an OPEN Conversation seminar that brings together international researchers and patient advocates from Trinity College Dublin’s Global Brain Health Institute and local patient partners with international dementia research experience.

Together, they will share strategies to transform dementia research, promote inclusive outcomes, and address the challenges of implementing patient and public involvement in Asia and beyond.

Access full information, including speakers and facilitators, and register below.

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This is a closed session of collective reflection over supper for presenters of Creative Brain Week Singapore 2026.

Indications of interest to participate are welcome by email to [email protected].

​Is the right hemisphere the seat of the creative brain? Do psychedelic drugs enhance creativity? Does mental illness accompany creativity? These are some of the many exciting questions about creativity that have long been of interest to researchers and the general public alike.

In our attempt to understand how creative minds operate we favour explanations that are eccentric. It is as though any explanation for creativity, this seemingly magical phenomenon, must itself bear some inherent peculiarities to be convincing. When these notions come to be widespread and held as fact by many, academics often present them as pure myths that need to be debunked.

Nonetheless, despite all the pronouncements and evidence to the contrary, creativity 'myths' tend to persist. The question is why? In this lecture, Anna Abraham explores dominant notions that abound about the creative brain and how they come about. In doing so, she unravels their roots and their truths.

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About the facilitator

Anna Abraham is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and director of the Torrance Center for Creativity at the University of Georgia (UGA), USA.

Dr Abraham investigates the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, aesthetic experience and mental state reasoning.

Her educational and professional training has been within the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience, and she has worked across a diverse range of academic departments and institutions the world over, all of which have informed her cross-cultural and multidisciplinary focus.

She is the Founding Editor of the Cambridge Elements in Creativity and Imagination—an academic short book series. She has penned numerous publications including the 2018 book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (Cambridge University Press), and 2020 edited volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination. Her latest book is The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths (2024, MIT Press).

Practice may make perfect, but the point is to exercise those newly acquired motor skills from Paula’s workshop in Day 2 for our neurons to fire in ways that keep our synapses elastic and reconfigurable, as much for brain health and mental resilience as for communal learning and social sustainability.

No prior registration is required for this 15-minute review. Just come by and drop in.

How does epistemic justice interweave with cognitive justice and equity in brain health?

Orientation points in artistic research may hold the key to unlocking the neuroscience of creativity through the art and science of learning. How we come to know the world and embrace uncertainty through processual understanding can enable multiple knowledge bases and belief systems that seem antagonistic for mutual flourishing.

Thinking better together encourages the development of robust methods for collaborative and improvisatory practices across sectors, which this interactive lecture tackles head on as a creative challenge for our times.

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About the facilitator

​Dominique Lämmli is an artist, philosopher, and educator with a PhD in Global Studies, in which she developed Art in Action Research (AiAR)—a grounded methodological framework integrating artistic practice and inquiry. Her work combines writings on art and research methodology, studio-based practice and situation-specific, collaborative projects addressing intersections of art and society.

Since 2009, Dominique has been professor of fine arts at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Since 2008, she has co-directed FOA-FLUX, a research micro-hub exploring how art and society co-create futures and contribute to social and environmental transformation. As of 2026, she serves on the faculty of the Pre-Doctoral Programme in Art & Design at the University of the Arts Poznań (UAP) and the MA programme Reka Budaya, jointly organised by Jatiwangi art Factory and ISBI Graduate School (Indonesian Institute of Arts and Culture).

Recent publications include: (2026) "Integrating Artistic Practice and Inquiry: Art in Action Research," Emerging Trends in Design and Arts, Taylor & Francis; (2023) "Art in Action Research (AiAR) and the Glocal Rootings of Art," Culture Crossroads (2022); "Art in Action Research (AiAR): Integrating Tacit Knowledge into Research," Arts Research Africa.

This final field trip of Creative Brain Week Singapore 2026 brings us to the circus.

Bornfire, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in September this year, is a Singapore social circus dedicated to bridging differences through the arts. Rooted in cultural sustainability, Bonfire champions circus arts as a vibrant, evolving, and meaningful medium of expression and advocacy within a global contemporary circus movement.

In partnership with Creative Brain Week Singapore, Bornfire’s artistic director makes room for differences to gather under one big tent, towards thinking better together as part of the workshop programming for Bornfire Circus Festival.

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About the facilitator

Xyn Foo is an independent arts and cultural worker with a passion for circus arts, working primarily as a producer, director and researcher. She serves as the artistic director and an organising member of the circus collective Bornfire.

Her practice involves creating platforms for artistic development and community engagement; over the years, this has involved orchestrating circus festivals, designing training programs like SPROUTS, and founding initiatives such as Circus Scratch Nights.

Xyn frequently collaborates with The Esplanade, directing productions and producing events like Aerial Open Stage and Circus Open Stage for their annual Flipside festival. A core part of her practice is mentoring new artists in search of opportunities and guidance.

Beyond the circus world, Xyn enjoys extending her collaborative approach to community projects, such as producing puppetry festivals with Kallang Community Club, co-organising film series with Film for Action Singapore, and lead-producing Kampong Halloween. She works closely with a range of organisations, including The Esplanade Co Ltd, People’s Association, National Arts Council, Marina Central, Singapore River One, The Fingers Players and Dance Nucleus.

Xyn holds an MA in Arts and Cultural Leadership from LASALLE College of the Arts, awarded by Goldsmiths, University of London.

Everyone is welcome without prior registration.