The natural light makes this an especially beautiful time of year to visit the Peabody Essex Museum. On a recent trip, I caught the classic scene of schoolkids brought in for class, taking notes as they contemplated the art. Little did they realize that while they’re studying the artwork, the museum is studying how their brains work.

“If all of our experiences are created in our brains and our job is to create art and cultural experience, it seems like a good idea to understand better how brains work,” said Dan Monroe, the director and chief of executive officer of the Peabody Essex Museum. 

It turns out Monroe has been thinking about neuroscience and art for a while. When the museum secured a major grant to fund a neuroscience initiative, he jumped at the chance to hire a real scientist.

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Tedi Asher
Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum

“I was looking for opportunities that would allow me to communicate science to non-scientists,” said Tedi Asher, the museum’s very own neuroscientist. “Through this job, I perceived an opportunity to engage in that kind of communication in a creative spirit in a creative environment.”

Asher spends half her time doing research, both into the latest neuroscience on perception and behavior, and getting a kind of crash art education.

“The other half of my time, I would say, [is] spent in meetings with colleagues discussing exhibition design so I can bring those findings from the literature into those meetings and sort of lay them out on the table and see what people can do with them,” she said.

Asher is already providing insights into a problem Munroe says is common for museum-goers. “Going to art museums is tiring,” he said. “Everybody's familiar with that phenomenon. If you watch how people go through a larger art museum, you can see that they just tend to speed up as time goes by.” And that fatigue diminishes the experience. “So they're moving into ‘browse’ mode to an increasing degree, basically because they're getting tired,” he added. “The question is, ‘Why [do] we walk much further in many other contexts without getting tired?’”

The answer, according to Asher, could be what researchers call “switch cost.”  When our brains switch to a different activity, there’s a cost in terms of energy — you can get tired and make mistakes. Contemplating a work of art — as awesome as that is — can be a pretty intense task for your brain.

She said research shows that “if you give people more time between the tasks, you can reduce that cost associated with switching between the tasks. To me, this suggests that perhaps we might want to have little palate cleansers within the exhibitions to give people time to digest what they've just seen, and prepare for what they might see next.”

Munroe explained how that can translate into exhibit spaces that force museum-goers to rest their senses regularly. “We're trying to create more sinuous spaces without necessarily forcing people to follow a given track,” he said. “Fewer works of art in a space are better. It slows people down, and assuring that they can't quite see everything all at once is really, really important.”

Asher emphasized that they’re just scratching the surface here — the real work is ahead. Even though she’s having to learn a lot about art, she’s finding the collaboration a natural fit.

“You can conceive of artists and scientists — neuroscientist[s] in particular — as addressing, really, a similar set of questions with different techniques,” she said. “We're both trying to understand what makes us tick, and the approaches might be different. But I think there is a conversation between the two fields, if you can simplify it down to that.”