The work “Experiencing the Light Through our Skin – an EEG Study of Colored Light on Blindfolded Subjects” was presented at the 19^th annual IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering, Athens, Greece, 28-30 October 2019.

In this study the sensations from the skin were measured through electroencephalography (EEG) to understand its contribution to our experience of light. For this experiment the subjects were blindfolded and placed in a daylight isolated room with artificial light. Here they were exposed to red, green and blue light as well as darkness. Through a temporal spectrum evolution (TSE) and a machine learning algorithm for visualizing highly dimensional data (t-SNE) the color based perception signatures were found to be distinguishable. T-SNE clustered the TSE maps into four separable segments, one for each scenario. Inside each of these clusters unique delta, theta, alpha and beta event related desynchronization and synchronization (ERD/ERS) biomarkers could be found. These biomarkers could cultivate the idea that when red and blue are sensed through the skin they elicit cortical arousal and awareness, while green promotes calmness and relaxation.

Light_Paper_BiBE

EEG can offer a more objective and clear evaluation tool for different lighting settings. A current master thesis by Mads Deibjerg Lind <mlind14 <at> student.aau.dk> is using EEG to investigate  how light of different kind is translated in the brain.