Mystery Box
Exhibit called ‘Brain’
In the theater presentation on the brain and brain function, a clear resin 3D brain that lights up relevant brain areas
Bars of light passing across a massive tangle of cables give the sense of being surrounded by crackling electrical signals and firing neurons as you enter the American Museum of Natural History's new exhibit here. Most people may visit the museum for the fossils, but this time they'll want to stay for the brains. First-time attendees at a preview event on Tuesday (Nov. 16) paused at the entrance to gaze upon a 3-pound preserved brain that looked unremarkably pale and placid compared with what lay ahead. As visitors journey deeper into the exhibit, they encounter an interactive sensory feast that both surprises and stimulates. The exhibit, called "Brain: The Inside Story," represents a bit of a departure for the museum, said Joy Hirsch, director of the functional MRI Research Center at Columbia University. She consulted on the exhibit as an expert on brain imaging, but confessed to being floored when she saw everything come to life for the first time. "Museum exhibits like this are traditionally about fossils, about things other than who we are," Hirsch said. As she spoke, a raised circular pedestal on the exhibit floor showed a spinning movie of brain images of accomplished people such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and basketball player Landry Fields of the New York Knicks. Hirsch's lab used functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) scans to record brain activity of the celebrities as they looked at photos and listened to themselves at work. That was "to make the point that all of us are the product of our brains," Hirsch told LiveScience. "Whatever we do and feel and hear and experience is coded by our brains."
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