A New Community?
(The following was adapted by Michael Pearce from his post on the ASTC blog in July of 2005.)
A New Community?
While highly robust and reliable perceptual phenomena (often visual illusions) have long been a staple of science centers, exhibits about other areas of human thought and behavior—problem solving, emotion, language, decision-making, consciousness—have been less common. Good work about the thought and behavior of people and animals is out there—the past decade has seen museum exhibitions on the brain, risk, learning, identity, memory, creativity, and more. Yet psychology and neuroscience still feel like a pretty new frontier in the museum field, and they certainly have their own special challenges. A few of these challenges are:
1. Many of the phenomena of the mind and brain are hard to demonstrate in hands-on, stand-alone exhibits. Unlike “hard-wired” visual illusions, cognitive processes often take longer to demonstrate and are more difficult to experience directly and individually.
2. In the culture of science museums, staff scientists and exhibits people are more likely to be specialized in physics and biology, and take more interest in making exhibits in these areas. At the Exploratorium, it is only in the past six to eight years that we’ve had a staff position for a neuroscientist.
3. It’s not clear that visitors to science museums are easily amenable to exhibits whose purpose is to facilitate introspection into their own mental processes. It may be that, even in common and popular science exhibits, e.g. visual illusions, visitors perceive the exhibit more as a clever and fun device than as a window into their own minds. The Exploratorium is conducting research on this subject to see how serious an obstacle this really is.
4. Cognitive science is a younger discipline than biology or physics, and is still trying to define its main theories and to establish its framework and methods. How do we present and explain phenomena whose import and implications may not be well understood? How in particular can we explore that most elusive of mental phenomena, consciousness itself?
5. Since there is little or no mind/brain science in the curricula of the K-12 institutions that we most typically support, those who staff our teaching programs usually don’t have special training in cognitive science. In the Exploratorium teaching programs there is interest in psychology and neuroscience and enthusiasm about our cognition-related projects; but expertise still lags behind the other sciences.
I don’t mean to paint the situation with too broad a brush, and the above is certainly not put forward as a complaint. Rather I want to suggest that museum work on the mind and brain has its own particular methods, knowledge base, skill sets, and—perhaps—community of people doing it.
It is in this spirit that we hope to connect with people with special interest in this area who would like to participate in a loose network for sharing ideas, knowledge, visitor experiences, resources, and so on. One forum for this network can be this website, which provides a blog for sharing information and discussing issues, as well as a number of resources that we hope will be useful to the community. It shouldn’t be too hard to arrange occasional get-togethers, formal and otherwise, at some of the meetings (like ASTC) that many of us attend. A little further down the line we might see exhibit and research collaborations, museum studies classes focused on psychology, and so on. (Some of these things are, no doubt, already happening—all the more reason to spread the word.)
All this is based on the notion—a hypothesis, really—that there now exists a nascent community of people with some common goals and enthusiasms. I’m pretty certain the people and projects are there; time will tell how useful this site is.
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