There is a disease that affects many museum-goers.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s known to esteemed scholars (aka, Museum Hack guides) as \u201cgallery fatigue.\u201d The symptoms of \u201cgallery fatigue\u201d are fairly standard:<\/p>\n
Thankfully, we\u2019ve found the cure for gallery fatigue at Museum Hack: art appreciation, a coded phrase you\u2019ll recognize if you\u2019ve been on one of our tours.<\/p>\n
But gallery fatigue, or rather, the mental discomfort that estranges museum-goers from the art they\u2019ve come to see, is a real problem that museum professionals have been attempting to tackle for decades. The real cure may come from a surprising source: neuroscience.<\/p>\n
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Last May, the Peabody Essex Museum<\/a> (PEM) in Salem, MA became the first art museum to hire a resident neuroscientist, Dr. Tedi Asher. According to museum director Dan Monroe, the decision to appoint Dr. Asher came from a desire to not only display art, but to design art experiences that are perhaps more meaningful to visitors than staring blankly at paintings on a wall. We had the chance to chat with Dr. Asher and pick her brain about her research, its implementation at the PEM, and how it might benefit other organizations that curate museum experiences (like us!).<\/p>\n At first glance, museology and neuroscience might seem like two of the least likely disciplines to overlap. But the desire to use science to understand why and how art affects us is far from new. The question of what triggers our response to beauty and art goes all the way back to Plato<\/a>.<\/p>\n The specific merging of art and neuroscience can be dated back to the work of Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal. Dr. Cajal was a neuroscientist and talented sketch artist who discovered the ways neurons communicate with one another at the end of the 19th century (his drawings are part of a traveling exhibition<\/a>, currently on their way to the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA. Do yourself a favor and check it out).<\/p>\n The decision to merge the two disciplines at the PEM was largely the brainchild of Director Dan Monroe, who is a damn rockstar in our humble opinion. The goal of museums, in Monroe\u2019s view, is not to teach people everything they should know about art history, but instead to expand their horizons, to discover what strikes them.<\/p>\n In case you missed the big ass banner on our website, our company slogan is \u201cMuseums are F***ing Awesome,\u201d so we, too, prefer to highlight amazing, true stories over listing historical facts as a way to get our guests engaged. So when Dr. Asher told us this anecdote, we remained very professional externally, but internally were screaming, \u201cYAAAAAS.\u201d<\/p>\n According to a 2015 NEA survey<\/a>, the percentage of adults who attended museums annually fell from 2002 to 2012 by 5.5%, roughly 58 million people. Director Monroe heard this figure and decided it was about dang time to innovate. \u201cIf one\u2019s committed to creating more meaningful and impactful art experiences,\u201d Monroe stated in a 2017 interview<\/a>, \u201cit seems a good idea to have a better idea about how our brains work.\u201d Dr. Asher\u2019s appointment is part of an initiative at the PEM, funded by the Barr Foundation,<\/a> to use our growing wealth of knowledge about the brain to expand upon connections between art and neuroscience. Here are some of Dr. Asher\u2019s insights from her first year at the PEM.<\/p>\n Dr. Asher described her research as broken up into three phases. In phase one, she researches neuroscience literature, identifies relevant findings, and develops hypotheses (some of which we\u2019ll discuss later). Phase two consists of implementing those hypotheses, and phase three is all about evaluation. One of the coolest-sounding parts of Dr. Asher\u2019s job is that she gets to play with new evaluative techniques, like biometrics. \u00a0In a recent experiment, Asher attached glasses that track eye movements and GSR monitors to guests as they walked through an exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings.<\/p>\n Side note: we looked up wtf<\/i> a GRS monitor does, and it tracks how much your skin produces sweat. Your sweat glands are governed by your sympathetic nervous system (that thing that activates your fight-or-flight response) so how much you sweat is viewed as a metric of emotional arousal by scientists. (Also, your Tinder date.)<\/p>\n Dr. Asher and co. noticed that one guest had the highest GSR in the second gallery. After the experiment, they interviewed the guest about his life history and he revealed he was raised in New Mexico. The work in the second gallery featured paintings from O\u2019Keefe\u2019s time in that state, which explains why the guest had a strong emotional reaction to it.<\/p>\n There is a lot that Dr. Asher wants to unpack from that experiment, particularly surrounding the conscious vs. unconscious emotional experience. However, we are fascinated by the use of memory to trigger emotional responses to art. This isn\u2019t something that museums can do on a large scale obviously; however, the research is an exciting potential discovery for, say, a boutique guide agency focused on creating unique, sometimes customized, museum experiences.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve ever been to a Museum Hack Bootcamp (and if you\u2019re a museum professional, you should totally go to one), you know we love finding new and creative ways to get museum-goers engaging with the art. Museums have historically relied on one method of engagement: the wall text. These little blurbs tend to highlight things like brush strokes and depth, or note that said watchmaker was also a respected diplomat in the 1850s. Basically, they can be a bit dry. PEM Director Monroe puts it a little more diplomatically, noting that \u201cdidactic written labels don\u2019t stimulate people to interrogate works of art on their own.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Asher is exploring new ways of structuring wall texts in her most recent experiment. Her hypothesis is simple: viewing behavior (and our response to the work) is affected by assigning viewers a goal when looking at a work of art. She\u2019s been observing changes in viewing behavior when guests are given different types of goals. For example, she\u2019s asked guests to look for the circle in a painting or to assess their emotional response when looking at something.<\/p>\n This study helped Dr. Asher formulate her second hypothesis: that the best way to elicit meaningful engagement with the art is to ask the subject to make an aesthetic judgment about the piece. Do you like Dali\u2019s elephant? Does that picture of medieval baby Jesus creep you out?<\/p>\n These hypotheses give us clues as to what might be the most successful way to structure wall texts in the future. The content doesn\u2019t necessarily need to be changed, but the form matters. Dr. Asher\u2019s studies might provide museum professionals with new mechanisms to hook visitors. Maybe we start asking a guest to notice<\/i> the brush strokes and depth and relate <\/i>the watchmaker\u2019s experience to their own.<\/p>\n During our discussion, Dr. Asher cited a study<\/a> by Ed Vessel, a neuroscientist who has collaborated with the Rubin Museum and spent time at NYU\u2019s Art Lab. In this study, Dr. Vessel asked students to rate their emotional responses to art while they were undergoing an MRI scan. His team noted that when participants were making this judgement, their Default Mode Network (DMN) was more active. The DMN is a series of connected regions in your brain that tend to be at rest when you\u2019re engaged with external goals. However, the DMN is more active when you\u2019re doing things like reflecting on your day when you\u2019re on the train, daydreaming, and thinking about your emotional response to art. So when you\u2019re on a tour and we tell you not to look at the wall texts, but instead ask you, \u201cHow do you like this Monet? He didn\u2019t like it either,\u201d we\u2019re not just talking about art. We\u2019re helping you stimulate your sense of self.<\/p>\n You\u2019re welcome.<\/p>\n Even prior to Dr. Asher\u2019s involvement with the PEM, the museum was known for staging exhibitions that defied convention. In 2016, the PEM staged an exhibition entitled \u201cAsia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age<\/a>,\u201d which centered on the influence of newly opened trade routes with Asia on Dutch art in the 17th century. Before guests entered the exhibition, they were greeted with boxes of spices that would have been commonly traded during the era contemporary with the paintings. Dr. Asher explained that the idea of staging unexpected \u201centry experiences\u201d helps to stimulate the brain prior to engaging with the art. Dr. Bevil Conway, a panelist on the PEM neuroscience initiative and collaborator on this exhibition, has said that the brain responds to \u201cchange, diversity, and motion.\u201d Therefore, offering something that stimulates the senses unexpectedly (like staging a dance piece before a Rodin exhibit<\/a> as the PEM did in 2016) elicits a stronger response from the brain.<\/p>\n The stimulation of multiple senses is also key. As Dr. Asher explained it, the senses are five pathways for information to get to your brain. When your eyes, ears, or nose pick up information, they send it to the thalamus which then shoots it out to the other parts of your brain that will process that info. So when you experience multiple senses at once, those signals are merged on their way to the thalamus, creating a stronger message for your neurons to respond to. Is your mind blown yet? Well try sipping some nice Merlot next time you look at a Toulouse Lautrec<\/a> painting and tell us your neurons aren\u2019t responding.<\/p>\n One marked element of a traditional gallery experience is having to look at about 15 different paintings on a wall at once. The salon-style method of hanging paintings is probably familiar if you\u2019ve ever read an interior design magazine. Essentially, an expert (a curator, or<\/p>\nMuseums and Neuroscience: Why The Combo Works<\/h3>\n
Why Does That Dali Make Me Cry and Why Does That Picasso Make Me Laugh?<\/h3>\n
About Those Wall Texts<\/h3>\n
You Mean I Can Smell the Art?<\/h3>\n
Your Brain on Paintings: Less is More<\/h3>\n