The human brain is a pretty amazing thing. It can fill in the blanks when needed information is missing, and if something doesn’t seem quite right the brain does everything it can to hold onto what it perceives as reality. The Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands is playing with the brain’s powers of perception with an installation called Brain Trip.

The installation has the museum visitor put on a brainwave-reading headband. The headband uses electroencephalography (EEG) to determine how focused or relaxed the viewer is. As the viewer watches a screen, he or she is taken from the world of reality into a world of incredible surrealism.

The more focused the viewer is, the more their experience remains anchored in reality. As he or she relaxes, the scenes become more and more bizarre. The process is tiring, and eventually the brain gets too tired to carry on with the extreme surrealism no matter how relaxed the viewer is. At that point, the display informs the viewer that it is time to surrender to the surreal world. After the experience, viewers can see a report of their brain activity during the display and find out how much of the time their brain was focused and how much of the time it spent relaxed.

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As our world gains more advanced technology, just think about what we are losing. We lose the history of the gadgets we grew up with, along with the way it felt to live in that comparatively low-tech world. The delightfully eccentric Brendan Chilcutt is attempting to preserve at least a part of our tech history by creating the amazing Museum of Endangered Sounds. In his virtual museum, Chilcutt preserves the noises that used to accompany our gadgets: the rattling zip of a dot matrix printer, the subtle but clanky whoosh of a VCR sucking up a VHS tape, and more that anyone over the age of 25 will probably remember fondly.

The sounds in the museum made us unexpectedly nostalgic. The jarring sounds of a dial-up modem were particularly emotional. You can choose to play the sounds in the museum one at a time or create a kind of mega-mashup by activating all of the buttons at once and listening to a deafening auditory pile of history. According to Brendan, the world is a poorer place for having lost these vintage sounds and will be poorer still when all of our technology is entirely silent other than the sounds we choose to hear. Chilcutt’s plan is to continue collecting endangered sounds through 2015, then spend several years refining the sounds.

The post Preserving the Sounds of Yesterday’s Household Gadgets first appeared on Gajitz.