Berger Mandalas

The 'Berger Mandalas' are an artistic tribute to the groundbreaking research of the German psychiatrist Hans Berger (1873-1941). A century ago, in 1924, at the University of Jena, Berger reached an important milestone by recording the first electrical brain signal in humans using a string galvanometer. His refinement of techniques led to the development of the 'Elektrenkephalogramm', laying the foundation for modern electroencephalography (EEG).

Traditionally, EEG signals are represented in a Cartesian coordinate system to capture their temporal dynamics. However, when represented in a polar coordinate system, periodic voltage amplitudes produce intricate patterns reminiscent of mandalas. These patterns, characterised by regularity and order, reflect the underlying temporal structure of the brain's electrical activity.

The artwork presented here commemorates the centenary of Berger's pioneering achievement by visually representing exactly 100 EEG recordings. These recordings come from the resting state of the TDBRAIN dataset, available through the Bainclinics foundation's webpage (https://brainclinics.com/resources/), which also provides access to Hans Berger's original publications from 1900 to 1938.

The colour palettes are randomly selected from a pool of 100 options and assigned to each mandala in the EEG model. The proportions between the sides follow a pyramid sequence. Documentation detailing the pre-processing of the EEG and the transformation from Cartesian to polar coordinates, together with the code for generating the artwork, is available at https://github.com/albertoarturovergani/berger-mandalas. Interestingly, the composition of 100 Berger mandalas can also be perceived as one large, independent Berger mandala, evoking various hierarchies of periodic spatial structures.