Mindscape: Re-constructing Memories

​Could we walk through a memory with someone else?

 

Mindscape is a programme which allows patients to re-create and interact with their personal memories in virtual reality as part of therapy. 

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This project explore the potential relationship between reconstructed virtual memories and therapeutic practice.

 

Talking therapies frequently rely on language to describe places, events and experiences that may be difficult to articulate. We are interested in whether a curated virtual reality 'memory' models could introduce another possibility: transforming fragments of remembered experience into environments that can be entered, explored and discussed.

 

A person might describe a childhood home, a recurring dream or a significant place and gradually construct a virtual interpretation of it together with a therapist or practitioner. The aim would not be to produce an objectively accurate reconstruction. What is omitted, exaggerated, invented or distorted may itself become meaningful. this project investigates how emerging spatial technologies might allow memories to be externalised and encountered differently: not simply as stories that we tell, but as spaces that we can explore together.

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These ‘virtual memories’ are produced from multi-modal patient input such as photographs, film footage, texts, and sound recordings, created with a novel AI-assisted protocol that turns subjective ‘data’ into virtual artefacts.

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The theraputic application of this could be the treatment of dementia, Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (TF-CBT), Reminiscence Therapy, Compassion-Focused Therapy, and many other scenarios where the co-exploration of a memory space can produce a postive theraputic outcome. 

 

 

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