Look once, and it’s just an upside-down face of a woman smiling. But look again, perhaps a third time, and a few details seem off. Something’s wrong, definitely wrong, even if you can’t quite figure out what it is.
That is, until you flip the image right-side up, and the problems, all of them, become obvious. The eyes and mouth are both upside-down, and what becomes strange is how it wasn’t obvious right from the start. It’s a fun image, and a brain trick, but it’s also a lesson in neuroscience, about how hard the brain can work to correct information that doesn’t fit, smooth over incongruous details, in perception and cognition, until it’s faced with incontrovertible stimuli that will admit nothing else.
That sense of play to make more serious points and convey scientific information is on full display in “Mind/Matter: The Neuroscience of Perception, Attention, and Memory,” a new temporary exhibition that opens at the Yale Peabody Museum on Dec. 7. Curated by Daniel Colón-Ramos, Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology and Associate Director and Center Director at the Center for Neurodevelopment and Plasticity at Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute, “Mind/Matter” deploys art, magic, optical illusions, and games to take deep, fascinating dives into the history, philosophy, and current development of the study of the brain.
The exhibition is the first of its kind in that particular gallery of the Peabody but not the last. “It’s a model that we hope to repeat,” said David Skelly, director of the Peabody, about the exhibition and the collaborations among multiple institutions that brought it about. “We know a lot about dinosaurs here but not much about neuroscience.” Bringing in Colón-Ramos allowed the Peabody to branch out beyond its own in-house expertise and “tell stories about science.”
“Everything we experience about being human resides in this three-and-a-half-pound organ in ways we don’t fully understand,” Colón-Ramos said, motioning to a vividly accurate model of the brain at the entrance to the gallery. The exhibition, he hopes, relays “a story of discovery” about “how the human brain puts together reality and how we experience being and self.”
The exhibition is split into four sections. The first, entitled “Butterflies of the Soul,” centers on the work of two pioneering neuroscientists, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Camillo Golgi, who shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in understanding how the brain works. Based on samples and data, Golgi understood the brain as a “nerve net,” Colón-Ramos said, while Cajal understood it as composed of separated cells. In the end, Cajal’s concept proved more accurate; as Colón-Ramos put it, in underlining the importance of Cajal’s breakthroughs as the father of modern neuroscience, “if he were British, he would be buried in Westminster Abbey.”
But the shared Nobel wasn’t unwarranted; both scientists were crucial in forming neuroscience as a discipline. Their original drawings based on their studies — exhibited together for the first time in the Peabody’s exhibit, thanks to a collaboration with the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales and the Legado Cajal (in Spain) and the Camillo Golgi Museum and University of Pavia (in Italy) — are not only fascinating artifacts of the scientific process, but illustrate how scientists can “see the same thing” and “come to different conclusions,” Colón-Ramos said. This comment about how perceptions of the same thing can differ from person to person turns out to be foundational to the exhibition, and as Colón-Ramos detailed, to a few core ideas motivating neuroscience, which relies on the “very meta” idea that we are trying to use our brains to understand how brains work.
The next section of the exhibition, about perception, uses a series of optical illusions and magic tricks guaranteed to draw in children and adults alike. There are the faces that only reveal how strange they are when turned right-side up; a few different objects that can appear to be convex or concave; a few objects that seem to change color or length depending on context. It’s a lot of fun, but it makes a deeper and quite serious point, that our perception of reality, which can seem so objective, “is really a construct,” Colón-Ramos said, contingent not only on the context around us, but who we are, our histories, our personalities. Even basic perceptions, such as color, are contingent, “a perception”; in comparing a glorious sunset to a flat blue sky hours before, the only thing that has changed is the angle at which the light moves through the sky. And — in a “handshake” to the rest of the museum — Colón-Ramos pointed out that the ability to perceive color varies from species to species. Humans can see more color than dogs, but dragonflies see “10 times more color” than humans do.
Our perception of the simplest things, like the color of a basketball, is limited and subjective. Our construction of what we perceive is perhaps ours alone. What is real, in short, is beyond the limits of one person to perceive. It can sound a bit philosophical — or, for that matter, like late-night dorm room talk — but being unaware of those limitations has serious consequences. “Take that into the political sphere,” Colón-Ramos said, “and you can see where we are.”
This perception part of the exhibition is thus “trying to put people out of their brains,” to help them see how their perceptions construct reality, and to make the point that “gathering information” beyond your own perception — starting with getting the perspectives of others — isn’t just an exercise in open-mindedness. It “gives you a better sense of what is real,” Colón-Ramos said. “More information is more perspective.”
The limits of that construction of reality are further explored in the next section of the exhibition, about attention. “What we pay attention to is really important for what we consider reality,” Colón-Ramos said, especially as “we can only pay attention to a couple of things at a time.” Magic, he pointed out, works by diverting our attention at the right time, making us pay attention to the wrong thing. Insects use similar diversions to create camouflage for themselves.
The limits of our brains’ attention are also underlined in neurological cases of hemispatial neglect, in which damage to one side of the brain — as occurs, say, in stroke victims — can result in a person’s inability to perceive objects or even parts of their own body on one side of them. Neuroscientists have discovered that the problem isn’t in the eyes themselves, but in the brain’s processing of that information. The thing we call “sight” is more complex than it appears; “seeing is not really seeing,” Colón-Ramos said, in that “it’s not just what our eyes capture.”The next part of the exhibition, about memory, adds another layer of complexity. “Not all memories are the same,” Colón-Ramos said, beginning with the fact that “they are stored in different parts of the brain.” He pointed out an image that he created for the exhibition using AI. It’s an image of a pretty typical street in Puerto Rico, where Colón-Ramos grew up, and it’s full of factual information that viewers will likely retain in their short-term memory but then forget quickly. The station wagon in the picture is a lot like a car his family had when Colón-Ramos was a boy. But Colón-Ramos has added a detail; as an accompanying note explains, he had a sister who died when she was a year and a half old, and Colón-Ramos has included an older version of her in the car. It’s a photograph of a wish, of a devastating personal event.
“That is an emotional memory,” Colón-Ramos said, “and you will probably remember that,” long after the route number on the street sign is forgotten.We associate our memories with our identity and our humanity, Colón-Ramos said, but even these can be more slippery than they seem. Neurologists use the term “infantile amnesia” to denote the way most adults have very few, if any, episodic memories from the first three or four years of their lives. But that doesn’t mean that no memories are formed at all. For starters, we learn languages, basic concepts about the world, the identities of the family and friends that frequent our lives. Those memories are just of a different form, and many of them are almost indelible.
Meanwhile, at the other ends of our lives, “loss of memory is also associated with some of the most devastating diseases that we know of,” Colón-Ramos said.
As a particularly poignant illustration, the exhibition includes four self-portraits by artist William Utermohlen. The earliest work is from 1967. In 1995, Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and as an accompanying note explains, “was encouraged to use his artwork to process the psychological and physical experience of his illness. Creating these works helped him preserve his identity as an artist,” and “together they are a unique chronicle of the human experience with dementia.” The last piece dates from 2000; Utermohlen died in 2007.The final part of the exhibit points toward the future — and the timely — as it jumps from human to artificial intelligence. Amid the dire warnings, hatred, dismissal, and also rampant use of AI that still dominate the popular conversation about it, the exhibition charts an informative middle path through it, detailing the ways in which computer scientists emulated concepts from neuroscience to program machines to learn, and in turn, some of the ways in which AI processes are helping to inform neuroscience. For Colón-Ramos, one of the most salient points about AI is how fast it is currently developing. Even in the six months it took to develop the Peabody show, he said, AI measurably improved, ever closing the gap in our ability to tell the results of human and AI endeavors apart. There are still tells, in writing, photography, research, and other areas of AI application, but there is no particular reason to think that someday that gap will close.
As with all facets of the exhibition, the final section opens up questions that feel almost philosophical in nature. Colón-Ramos pointed out that AI is, in a sense, simply the latest example of ways that it turns out maybe humans aren’t so unique or central to existence after all. But perhaps it isn’t the threat so many make it out to be either. Centuries ago, he reminded us, we thought the universe revolved around the sun; now we know that even if there is a center of the universe, we’re certainly nowhere near it. We are learning all the time about cognition in animals and behavior in plants that seems ever more social. Likewise, perhaps AI will simply show us how we’re part of a larger whole, not so apart from it. And isn’t that maybe just another perspective, that brings us a little closer to reality?
“Mind/Matter: The Neuroscience of Perception, Attention, and Memory” opens at the Peabody on Dec. 7. Admission is free. Visit the Yale Peabody Museum’s website for hours and more information.
