Recent developments overcoming technical restrictions of traditional brain imaging approaches now allow for brain imaging of actively behaving participants in real and virtual environments. This is a significant step in advancing our knowledge of the neural basis of human action, cognition and emotions as rooted in our bodies and adapting to a dynamically changing environment. Investigating brain dynamics during active behavior on different temporal and spatial scales allows to explore hitherto unknown interactions of the human body and the mind during natural cognitive tasks and allows for extending neuroscientific research to the fields of art, innovation, and creativity.

Complex settings such as museums and art venues attract tens of thousands of people with rich demographics thereby (a) providing a unique opportunity to study the population distribution, variability and individuality of neural activity and (b) advancing understanding of the brain dynamics underlying emotive and cognitive systems operating in ‘action and context’ in natural environments.

Ultimately, fundamental knowledge and engineering innovations emerging from MoBI studies will lead to advanced understanding of human responses to emotionally rich stimuli such as the creative arts, our physical environments, and our interactions with technology, in turn leading to better engineering design of wearable technologies and MoBI-based biomedical devices based on scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and other noninvasive imaging modalities.

Using mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI) including new mobile hardware technology for electroencephalography (EEG) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and advanced data-driven analysis approaches allow separation of signals from the brain and from non-brain sources (muscles, eyes, electrical noise, etc.). This allows for imaging the distributed brain dynamics that support motivated actions and interactions of individuals during natural cognitive tasks like orienting in space. MoBI offers a new approach to investigating brain dynamics in rehabilitation involving actively moving patients, neuroergonomics investigating active interactions with a system and more basic research areas that require participants to interact with their environment using their physical structure.

The advent of MoBI further allows to cross the boundaries of traditional neurosciences and to explore the human brain during creation and perception of art, including neural activity during dance, music performance, the brain dynamics evolving in classroom settings and new forms of creative processes leading to innovation.

We call for manuscripts on this Research Topic – both original research contributions using MoBI approaches, as well as theoretical, methodological or historical reviews or opinion papers on ongoing developments in recording and analysis of data recording the brain activity and body movements of actively behaving participants in established neuroscience research areas and new fields including the arts, creativity, medicine, education and others. Applications in new research areas (arts, dance, education, creativity, art therapy, gait and stroke rehabilitation, cognitive neuroscience, physical and mental fatigue) are particularly encouraged.

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.