Challenges of Neurodiversity

The ability to reach goals in life is highly dependent on the brain’s executive function system. This system works by integrating past and present information in order to control one’s behavior, thoughts, and emotions towards a desired future. In order to maintain control over their own behavior in relation to a future goal, an individual needs to adjust appropriately and tolerate changing demands of a situation, abandon plans and viewpoints when they are no longer appropriate, switch or alternative between focuses, rules, and frameworks, consider diverse perspectives, and engage in ‘big picture’ thinking. These processes are determined by an individual’s aptitude for cognitive flexibility, a core component of the executive function system (Diamond, 2013).

The everyday behavioral challenges reported by parents and caregivers of children with neurodivergent diagnoses are due, at least in part, to dysfunction in cognitive flexibility, particularly in Autism Spectrum Disorder (Leung & Zakzinis, 2014), and likely through related deficits in inhibition in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (Barkley, 1997). This means that many neurodiverse children typically have difficulty adjusting appropriately when meeting uncertainty or unexpected challenges in everyday situations.

Explaining Restoration

A growing body of evidence has revealed that viewing nature improves executive functioning by restoring the brain’s ability to engage in top-down control, with the largest effects produced using measures of cognitive flexibility (Stevenson et al., 2018). This restoration is believed to occur in environments where perceptual systems are captured by ‘softly’ or intrinsically fascinating stimuli that induce involuntary, effortless, bottom-up processing while reducing the relative cognitive burden required for engaging in the effortful, top-down, goal-directed processing that underlies executive functioning (Kaplan, 1995).

Completion’s Use of Fractals

Completion is immersive VR experiences that combines fractal art and music in a new 10-minute format. Fractal geometry is a key feature that distinguishes viewing nature, as mentioned above, from other sensory experiences. Hence, looking at fractals can trick our brain into taking a mental break from top-down processing and logical reasoning in order to bring about the restorative attention effects of intrinsically fascinating stimuli and bottom-up processing.

Fractals are a naturally occurring phenomenon of repeating, infinite patterns, like branches of a tree, creating branches themselves, etc., resembling each other at every level of scale but with variations and an infinite number of replications.

In Completion, the fractals are computer-generated patterns of various shapes and colors that evolve in seemingly infinite ways, creating an appealing and engaging visual experience. The abstract geometric properties of the fractals and their self-replicating dynamics make it difficult for the brain to conceptualize the patterns and reason about them, affording a visual and mental experience that is guided by bottom-up visual cues from the fractals.