The exhibits in MIND will give you new ways
of experimenting with your thoughts and feelings and new insights
into your decisions, perceptions, and emotional reactions. The
project team worked with a diverse advisory group of scientists
and artists to research the cognitive sciences and create experiences
highlighting the workings of the human mind—often in unexpected
and thought-provoking ways. Here are a few of the experiences
you’ll have when you visit this provocative new addition to the
museum’s collection:
A Sip of Conflict
Play with the tension between reason and emotion as you drink
from a water fountain fashioned from an actual (but unused!)
toilet.
Center of Attention
This exhibit simulates the experience of standing in front of
a lively crowd. The crowd’s changing responses allow you to
examine your own emotional and cognitive reactions to being
in the limelight.
Be Here Now
This meditative spot challenges you to empty your mind and observe
the gentle flow and direction of your own uncontrolled thoughts.
Mood Lighting
This exhibit bathes you in colored light, initiating a surprisingly
powerful emotional experience and suggesting the importance
of visual stimuli in provoking feelings.
Piano Drop
What does “risk” mean to you? Stand under this piano and find
out.
The Eyes Have It
Here, you’ll infer the emotional states of others from their
eyes alone, illuminating the way we decode faces to interpret
their owners’ inner states.
Masks
In a counterpoint to The Eyes Have It, Masks challenges
you to communicate feelings without facial expressions—instead,
you must use your body to send emotional messages to others.
Startle Response
Startle Response offers you a chance to see the subtle
movements and changes that play out across your own face in
a moment of extreme surprise.
See Yourself Sweat
This exhibit magnifies a small patch of your skin as you think
about emotionally arousing ideas or images. Your thoughts trigger
immediate secretion of sweat, and the sudden appearance of
these glistening globules shows a concrete physiological reaction
to an amorphous cognitive event.
True Mirrors
Normal and reversed mirrors let you see yourself as you normally
do and compare that image with something you rarely encounter—your
own face as others see it. The unsettling result illustrates
what happens when expectations are subtly violated.
Dare to Compare
Mix and match descriptions to create an individual personality
portrait of yourself or a friend, and bring to light your theories
of how traits and behaviors fit together—or don’t.
Animal Camera
These film loops from artist Sam Easterson were created by temporarily
fixing tiny cameras to animals, including a wolf, bison, scorpion,
tarantula, and others. The resulting mini-movies vividly illustrate
how perspective affects our perceptions—and raise questions
of the consciousness of nonhuman creatures.
Divided Attention
Forcing you to pay attention to numerous stimuli at once highlights
the limits of the human mind’s attentional capacity.
Theater of the Mind
This area provides a venue for films highlighting a range of
perspectives on thoughts, feelings, and the human condition.
Poker Face
At Poker Face, you’ll lie to a friend about the contents
of a poker hand—or try to detect your friend’s lie. This two-person
exhibit lets you experiment with trying to conceal your thoughts
and with using facial cues to interpret hidden motivations.
Talk to Daisy
A computer program designed to mimic human verbal communication
lets you have a “conversation” with a machine and explore your
ideas about consciousness, meaning, and intelligence.
Color Your Judgment
An exhibit highlighting the power of expectations, Color
Your Judgment pairs familiar scents with liquids of various
colors, showing how knowledge of what something “should” look
like can affect our perceptions.
Stretching Your Attention
Experiment with identifying simultaneous events and
see how practice may improve your attentional abilities.
The Cute Room
These exhibits let you manipulate familiar objects
and experiment with the things that make them seem cute… or not.
Is cuteness in the eye of the beholder?
Fast Faces
You probably recognize most of these people, but waiting
for a specific image may impede your ability to name them.
Polite
Smile, Delight Smile
Can you tell the difference between the posed and spontaneous
smiles at this exhibit? These happy faces test the limits of
your innate face-reading capabilities.
AHA Moment
Insight often comes in a flash… with the right hint.
Time
To Think
Modeled on a fundamental experimental technique for studying
cognitive activity, this exhibit illustrates how increasingly
complex mental tasks dramatically affect your reaction time.
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The
Exploratorium's MIND Project was made possible with support from the National
Science Foundation under grant no. 0307927 and by an in-kind gift from Neurosky,
Inc.
Donations