exhibits

MIND exhibits will give you new ways of experimenting with your thoughts and feelings—and unexpected insights into your decisions, perceptions, and emotional reactions. The project team worked with a diverse group of scientists and artists to research the cognitive sciences and create compelling experiences highlighting the subtle, often unconscious, yet profoundly consequential workings of your mind.

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 audience’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.
The Eyes Have It
Here, you’ll infer the emotional states of others from their eyes alone, highlighting the way we decode faces to interpret their owners’ inner states.
Communicating Emotions With Your Body
This exhibit prompts you to communicate feelings without facial expressions; instead, use your posture and movements to send emotional messages to others. Try this at home!
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 a cognitive event.
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—a wolf, bison, scorpion, tarantula, and others. The resulting mini-movies vividly illustrate how perspective affects our perception of the world around us.
Divided Attention
Forcing you to scan numerous stimuli at once highlights the limits of the human mind’s attentional capacity. Try this online!
Mind Cinema
This intimate theater provides a comfortable venue for pondering and discussing films highlighting differing perspectives on thinking, feeling, and the human condition.
Albert is Watching
Even an obviously mechanical device can seem to have consciousness if it turns to follow your movements.
Bronze Hand
Can your own arm fool you? Blurring the connection between mind and matter, this compelling illusion changes the way you experience your body.
Poker Face
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 attempt to conceal your thoughts and learn to use 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.
Master Mind Machine
This imposing robotic presence from artist-in-residence Kal Spelletich responds to your movements and inspires a troubling mix of awe, fear, and wonder.
Fast Faces
You probably recognize most of these people, but watching for a specific image may impede your ability to name them.
Who Lives Here?
Peek through these windows to investigate how your theories about personality guide your guesses about the lives of strangers.
Perilous Portal
Walking under this ladder lets you explore the tension between rationality and emotion by challenging a common superstition.
Mind Video Projections
These large-scale silent projections evoke a mood of contemplative mystery while highlighting key ideas of the collection. One looping display includes a diverse array of emotional human faces from the museum’s film archives; another follows the hands of an anatomist as he dissects a human brain.
Faces and Masks
This wall of visages from around the world reveals both the breadth and diversity of human cultures and the universality of our emotional expressions.
Color Your Judgment
An exhibit highlighting the power of expectations, Color Your Judgment pairs familiar scents with colored liquids, showing how knowledge of what something “should” look like can affect our perceptions. Try this at home!
Stretching Your Attention
Experiment with identifying simultaneous events and see how practice may improve your attentional abilities.
The Cute Nook
This family of exhibits—including Cutify and Cabinet of Cuteness —lets you examine and manipulate familiar objects to experiment with the aspects that make them seem cute . . . or not. Is cuteness in the eye of the beholder? Try this online!
Brain Dissection Station
Trained Explainers dissect sheep brains (they’re quite similar to your own), describing key neurological structures and exploring the differences between minds and brains.
Polite Smile, Delight Smile
Can you tell the difference between the planned and spontaneous smiles at this exhibit?
Insight Puzzles
Aha Moment and Horses and Riders require you to shift your perspective to solve a vexing puzzle.
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.
Competent Candidates
How do we make judgments about people we don’t know? Based on recent psychological research, this exhibit lets you compare your own assessments of the competence of political candidates with their performance in actual elections.
Mirrorly a Window
This classic exhibit triggers a bizarre proprioceptive illusion and illustrates the degree to which even basic knowledge about oneself can be called into doubt.
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.
Easy Search, Difficult Search
Our ability to locate even simple objects can be helped or hindered by the context of our quest.
Get Used to It
Our nervous systems are designed to notice change, so even striking sensory experiences can fade quickly. These adjacent exhibits illustrate this habituation effect with both smell and touch.
Brain Slices
Mounted slices of an actual human brain suggest the mysterious connection between mind and matter.
Hand-Foot Coordination
Why does combining two simple movements result in a nearly impossible task? This exhibit illustrates the bottleneck imposed by our attentional system.
Emotional Sounds
Overheard snippets of sound—people crying, laughing, whispering conspiratorially, muttering angrily—highlight the power of even brief emotional stimuli to elicit feelings in a listener.
Disappearer
By illustrating the malleability of our visual worlds, this stunning and controversial effect suggests the tenuous connection between perception and knowledge.
Judging Time
This intriguing animation shows the subjectivity and plasticity of our experience of time.
Philosopher’s Orb
Inspired by the Magic 8-ball®—a classic fortune-telling toy—this mysterious sphere poses compelling philosophical questions about the nature of mind and consciousness.
Trading Places
Based on a technique for studying stereotyping, this card game can reveal how hidden assumptions affect the way you see the people around you.
Emotion Tracer
Watch as a computer screen tracks your own physiological reactions to embarrassing or disturbing stimuli.
Judging the Odds
Can you be led astray by a simple guessing game? The problem may seem straightforward, but human judgment is anything but.
Reading Eyes
See how much you can communicate to another with your eyes alone—and experience the powerful emotional effects of sustained eye contact.