WIP & Pride Snacks

Presented by Samira Abdelhamid

To celebrate Pride Month, we will start this session with some sweet treats and a bite-sized talk by Samira, highlighting the education and engagement work she has done in schools with Pride in STEM.  

Sigur Rós: Ára. Understanding transformative, flourishing experiences

Presented by Anna Breitenmoser

Abstract:Transformative experiences sit close to the heart of human flourishing and well-being. They can reshape what people value and how they relate to the world, and are reported with striking consistency across artistic, contemplative and spiritual contexts. Despite their importance, the scientific study of such experiences remains underdeveloped. Most laboratory studies rely on brief stimuli and short questionnaires that capture only a small part of these experiences and rarely place participants in deeply immersive settings. Approaches from the humanities provide valuable interpretations of such experiences, but these interpretations can vary between individuals and traditions. A major challenge for the field is therefore to bring together perspectives from science, the humanities and creative practice.

The forthcoming public installation Ára at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities offers a unique opportunity to address this challenge. Created by the spatial-audio team Loss><Gain and featuring the music of the Icelandic ensemble Sigur Rós, Ára runs from 26 June to 19 July 2026 and welcomes audiences of approximately thirty-five people at a time. Participants experience the work within a specially constructed immersive environment known as a “Blackbox”, designed for experimental artistic experiences combining spatial sound, lighting and scent. The work has been created to encourage deep, sustained and emotionally rich listening, and the artistic team has agreed to incorporate scientific research into the installation.

The project is led jointly by Professor Morten L. Kringelbach (Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing) and Professor Finn Moore Gerety (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Harris Manchester College). It takes place in two stages. The first stage examines how audience members engage with the Ára experience over time. Participants use a hand-held device to indicate moments of particularly strong engagement, complete questionnaires, and a smaller group take part in detailed interviews about their experience. The second stage takes place at the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (OxCIN) and the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (OHBA), where a smaller group of participants undergoes brain imaging using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). MRI provides detailed images of brain structure, while MEG is a non-invasive technique that records the magnetic signals naturally produced by the brain. We compare participants with long-term meditation experience to participants without meditation experience while they engage in meditation or quiet rest, experience scent, and listen to music from Ára.

The different sources of information collected during the study, including continuous measures of engagement over time, questionnaire responses, interviews and brain recordings, will be analysed together. We will examine how participants’ experiences unfold across the duration of Ára, identify moments where engagement is particularly strong or widely shared, and explore how these moments relate to features of the music and to patterns of brain activity. The interview data will provide a richer account of how participants interpret and describe these experiences in their own words, allowing us to compare first-person accounts with behavioural and neural measures.

The project will produce two main outcomes: : A moment-by-moment characterisation of collective emotional engagement during a fully immersive aesthetic experience , and a better understanding of the brain processes associated with deep and meaningful listening experiences. Together, these findings will help develop new methods for studying transformative experiences and contribute to the broader scientific understanding of human flourishing and well-being. Results will be shared through academic publications and a public event at the close of the installation.