Brain Power Natural History Museum

A once-living example of the most complicated object in the universe is mounted in a case at the beginning of the ambitious exhibition “Brain: The Inside Story,” which opens on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History. And a sorry-looking object it is, if we put aside the symbolism and portentousness that have grown around it, and the research that barely has begun to dissect its innermost workings.Multimedia Slide Show‘Brain:The Inside Story’BlogArtsBeatThe latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.More Arts NewsApproach it without preconceptions and its compressed tubular windings make it seem like a small intestine coiled for easy transport. And this particular organ on display — which undoubtedly once contemplated the world with much curiosity as its observers now do — looks particularly inconsequential and stolid; it was preserved using “plastination silicone technique.”But it is helpful, at times, to see the three-pound human brain as a somewhat bizarre and alien thing. We must use it in order to study it, but it offers very little help. You can’t really peer into it, but it determines how we peer into anything else. For the most part, we can’t even see it or feel it do anything at all. The brain is most visible when it is most strange, for that is when its powers and limitations stand out from the background hum of ordinary experience.There are times, in this exhibition, when that happens, when we must stop and think about the organ that makes us stop and think. There are also, unfortunately, a few too many times when our own brains are put into passive, textbook-reading mode. But the high points stand out. Look at a seemingly random display of colored spools of thread in the first gallery, for example, an art installation by Devorah Sperber. Gaze at that array through a spherical lens and we see that the spools actually create a pixilated and inverted image of the Mona Lisa: a neat demonstration that it isn’t just sensation that the brain processes; sensations are also given shape. In this case, we learn, the “fusiform face area” of the brain, which is utilized for facial recognition, is being put to work.

“Brain: The Inside Story” opens on Saturday and runs through Aug. 14 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street; (212) 769-5100, amnh.org.

via ‘Brain’ Exhibit at American Museum of Natural History – Review – NYTimes.com.