Bren is a cognitive scientist, scholar of imagination, outsider artist and game designer. He is an associate professor and director of the Imagination Lab. His research uses psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience to investigate the role of imagination and future thinking in empathy, social connection, morality, and collective cognition. His art and games explore these themes in practice.
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LUCID DREAM MINIGOLF
How can a game use whimsy to be deep? How can a game use the silly to be sentimental? This traveling existential minigolf course designed by Bren and friends explores these questions, creating a story that uses the medium of minigolf as performance theater and interactive narrative. Lucid Dream Minigolf: In Search of Lost Time explores deeper post-pandemic themes of overcoming a sense of being behind in one's life, of feeling lost, and finding resiliency and shared experiences while playing putt-putt.
Learn more at luciddreamminigolf.com
LDM_Basilica_Hole1loop.mp4LDM_Basilica_Hole2loop.mp4LDM_Basilica_Hole3_loop.mp4PUPPETS & PARADES
Bren moonlights as a puppeteer with Processional Arts Workshop to help them activate site-specific performances, art parades and puppetscapes.
Bren is currently working on a book about the power of play in times of darkness.
Guest at Joshua Tree Highlands Residency
From milking cows on a dairy farm as a kid to running a lab as a professor of imagination, life has been an intellectual road trip. Bren received his B.A. from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he was a graduate student in the Memory Lab led by Dan Schacter. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Boston College in the Morality Lab led by Liane Young and affiliated with the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab led by Elizabeth Kensinger. During lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic he joined the Medical Reserve Corps of New York, helped create an ad hoc face shield factory out of a performance art venue, and then built a traveling existential minigolf course.
Inspired by ideas, people, and projects bridging science with art and the humanities, Bren’s work is visible in the scientific community through peer-reviewed research articles published in flagship journals (e.g., Psychological Science, PNAS, Cognition, Emotion, JPSP, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Trends in Cognitive Science, and Personality and Social Psychology Review). His research has been generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the Forrest Research Foundation, and federal institutions such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He has engaged the broader public by consulting with PBS, writing for Scientific American and The Conversation, recording a piece for NPR, speaking at Columbia’s Center for Science and Society, and serving as a panelist and consultant for the Museum of Science, Boston for a conference on imagination accessible to artists, educators, and the general public. Most recently he was selected as a research fellow at the Strong National Museum of Play to study the development of play and imagination across the lifespan.
He is grateful to live, write, and play in Hudson Valley.
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