The Peabody ponders perception

Andy Melien

An exhibit at the Peabody Museum looks at how the brain perceives the world around us. View full image

Andy Melien

An exhibit at the Peabody Museum looks at how the brain perceives the world around us. View full image

Andy Melien

A visual illusion from the exhibit. View full image

Andy Melien

A visual illusion from the exhibit. View full image

In the late nineteenth century, two scientists in different countries looked at brain tissue and made careful drawings. Equipped with the same technique and the same types of samples, they came to vastly different conclusions about the brain’s structure. In Italy, Camillo Golgi saw a continuous net of nerves. In Spain, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who had adopted Golgi’s technique for viewing tissue, thought he saw individual cells. Ramón y Cajal was right; we now refer to those cells as neurons.

Although they were as much antagonists as collaborators, Golgi and Ramón y Cajal shared a Nobel Prize for their work in 1906. Their pen-and-ink drawings are the anchors for an exhibit called Mind/Matter: The Neuroscience of Perception, Attention, and Memory, on view at the Yale Peabody Museum until the end of October. The exhibit is presented in collaboration with Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute, an interdisciplinary hub for research into neuroscience and cognition.

The exhibit uses the case of the two scientists to introduce an idea that is then explored in a series of interactive exhibits, says curator Daniel Colón-Ramos, the Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology and a faculty member at the Wu Tsai Institute. “The drawings tell a story about perception,” he says. “We want to guide people through the experience of how perception can fool them.”

In three sections focusing on perception, memory, and attention, the exhibit demonstrates how our brains make sense of the world. A mask of Albert Einstein that appears to us as convex, like a human face, is actually concave. Upside-down faces in wall-mounted photos appear normal until they are rotated and we discover that the eyes and mouth are inverted. “Our sense of reality is influenced by what we think is true,” says Colón-Ramos.

The exhibit also considers how other creatures experience the world: dogs, for example, see only shades of blue and yellow, a point made by a photograph in those limited tones and a cameo appearance by Handsome Dan II in taxidermied form.

In addition to the challenge of translating cognitive concepts into accessible interactive exhibits, bringing Golgi’s and Ramón y Cajal’s original drawings to America required some effort. The drawings are on loan from four institutions: the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales and the Legado Cajal in Spain and the University of Pavia and the Golgi Museum in Italy. Some of the originals had never been in public, and the two scientists’ drawings had never been exhibited together. Peabody director David Skelly says the Wu Tsai Institute was able to seal the deal because of the context they were providing for the drawings. “It took having world-class neuroscientists ask, and not just people in a museum,” he says.

Mind/Matter is the first temporary exhibit at the Peabody since it reopened last March after a four-year renovation and expansion, offering free admission to all of the public for the first time. The renewed museum has been a hit: before the renovation, the museum had 150,000 visitors in its biggest year. Skelly says they had 312,000 visitors during the eight months they were open last year.