NIL - the Neurocognitive Image Lab (NIL) at SISU is dedicated to interdisciplinary research in cognitive neuroscience and the arts. NIL aims to explore how the human brain perceives, processes, and aesthetically experiences images, uniting science, art, and technology within a shared vision of understanding the human mind.

The distinctive character — the unique signature — of NIL’s research lies in the complementarity of two forms of interdisciplinarity: horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal Interdisciplinarity

Horizontal interdisciplinarity fosters dialogue and collaboration across diverse disciplines. It opens new windows of inquiry by encouraging researchers to discover the unasked questions—the true hallmark of creative science.

Within this framework, NIL builds bridges to linguistics (with an emphasis on language competence), the humanities (including philosophy), artificial intelligence and robotics, and technological innovation that transforms “unused answers” into real applications. Collaborations also extend to medical fields such as neurology and psychiatry, to art history in exploring cultural differences, and to the arts themselves—poetry, music, architecture, and visual art—where science meets aesthetic expression.

Vertical Interdisciplinarity

Vertical interdisciplinarity, in turn, delves deeply into the neural mechanisms underlying subjective experience and human behavior. By combining advanced neuroimaging techniques—MEG, fMRI, and EEG—with mathematical and statistical modeling, NIL investigates how the brain represents images and scenes, processes time, and encodes space. These studies are conceptually embedded within an aesthetic framework, where neuroaesthetics—the neuroscience of beauty and art—forms a central pillar of NIL’s scientific identity.