From Abigail Rabinowitz and Carl E. Schoonover in Science:
The American Museum of Natural History’s Brain: The Inside Story does not open with the customary brain numerology—the billions of neurons and synapses, the eons of evolution spent packing it all into 1.4 kg of tissue. Instead, you feel your way down a winding corridor surrounded by 680 kg of tangled electrical wire and optical fiber. Spanish artist Daniel Canogar’s installation is lit up with rapid trickles of light and sheets of shifting color—a cross between forest and funhouse. There is no better way to see the organ as many a brain scientist does: a staggeringly complex, interconnected tangle in which countless subtle signals whizz by at breakneck speed.
Once the challenge of understanding the brain is made viscerally clear, the exhibition begins. Five main sections cover topics from the nervous system’s cellular workings and its role in sensation to how our brains learn and change over time. The immensely ambitious exhibition, based on a knowledge set that is still patchy, aims to explain the human brain to an audience of all ages.
If you are new to gray matter, trying to understand everything from synapses to synesthesia in two hours can feel demoralizing, like cramming from an encyclopedia for a multiple-choice test. But at its best, the show moves away from text-heavy placards to displays that encourage you to understand the brain intuitively. Some of this science exhibition’s most effective teaching tools are works of art. To explain how we perceive, Devorah Sperber’s visual puzzle assembles delicately tinted spools of thread into an abstract shape that, once refracted through a glass orb, resolves into a famous portrait. Her installation offers a powerful metaphorical account of how a nervous system takes in disjointed bits of information and synthesizes them into a clear, seamless percept—and does so in a manner that feels effortless to the perceiver. Just across the way, a 1.8-m-tall homunculus with monstrously large lips, hands, and feet symbolizes the relative size of the somatosensory cortex’s representation of various body parts. (Parents, do not fear: one oversized hand is strategically placed.)
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From Benedict Carey in the New York Times:
From Elizabeth Green in the New York Times Magazine:



