In 1906, biologists Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries that illuminated the physical structures of the human brain.
Working independently of each other, the two scientists illustrated their ideas and insights in beautifully detailed drawings, based on observations they had made while studying stains of brain tissues under microscopes. In pencil and ink, they sketched intricate branches of neurons and captured the complexities of the hippocampus and other building blocks of the brain with remarkable precision.
A selection of their artful observations opens “Mind/Matter: The Neuroscience of Perception, Attention, and Memory,” a new exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum that introduces visitors to the wonders and mysteries of human cognition by taking them on a journey through the historical and modern science of the brain.
The exhibition, which runs through late 2025, was created in partnership with the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University, an interdisciplinary research center that connects neuroscience and data science to accelerate breakthroughs in understanding cognition. It is the first temporary exhibition the Peabody has hosted since the museum reopened last spring after a building-wide renovation.
The exhibition features historic drawings by biologists Camillo Golgi and Ramón y Cajal of the building blocks of the brain. Golgi’s depiction of neurons is on the left and Cajal’s is on the right.
“This partnership with Wu Tsai is very exciting for us,” said Peabody Director David Skelly. “Here at the Peabody, we know a lot about dinosaurs, but not so much about neuroscience. The idea was to collaborate with colleagues at Yale who know a great deal about that topic and bring their expertise into the museum, where we can use our storytelling skills to make it accessible to the public.”
Daniel Colón-Ramos, the Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine and associate director of the Wu Tsai Institute, curated the exhibition with help from the museum’s staff and his colleagues at the institute.
In addition to Golgi’s and Cajal’s historic sketches, the exhibition features a series of mind-bending visual illusions that challenge visitors’ perceptions of reality, and interactive exhibits that test their attention, invite them to reflect on their memories, and prompt them to consider how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) affect assumptions about what makes humans unique.
Everything that we associate with the experience of being human resides in these three pounds of tissue in a way that we don’t yet understand.
Just outside the exhibition’s entrance, visitors encounter a hyper-realistic model of a human brain.
“Everything that we associate with the experience of being human resides in these three pounds of tissue in a way that we don’t yet understand,” said Colón-Ramos of the model. “With this exhibition, we wanted to have a little something for everybody, from little kids to adults, to help them appreciate the capabilities of the human brain.”
‘Science, history, and art’
A visitor’s journey into the realm of neuroscience begins with the pathbreaking discoveries of Golgi and Cajal, two founders of the field of neuroscience from Italy and Spain, respectively. In 1873, Golgi developed a silver staining technique that enabled the study of nervous tissue with a microscope. Using this method, Golgi and Cajal independently explored the structures of the human brain and nervous system, recording their observations with highly accurate and often aesthetically pleasing sketches.
The exhibition marks the first time that original drawings by the two scientists have been displayed together in a museum setting. On loan from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales and the Legado Cajal in Spain, and the University of Pavia and the Golgi Museum in Italy, several of the drawings have never been exhibited publicly before.
Golgi developed a method for observing brain tissue under a microscope. Examples of slides Cajal studied using Golgi’s method, foreground, right, are on display.
“These drawings are treasures, and we are deeply grateful to our colleagues in Spain and Italy for helping us present them here,” Colón-Ramos said. “They have incredible importance in terms of science, history, and art. By displaying them, we are showing people how scientists first observed brain structures and how they interpreted what they saw.”
Although they studied the same stains, Golgi and Cajal reached different conclusions. Both made accurate drawings of neurons — the nerve cells that are one of the primary building blocks of the brain — but while Golgi interpreted what he observed as a continuous nerve net, not individual cells, Cajal saw separate cells. (In his drawing, the Spanish scientist labeled the individual neurons with letters.)
Cajal’s interpretation, which proved to be correct, is a foundational discovery in neuroscience, Colón-Ramos said.
“Once you know that the brain is made of cells, it opens up all sorts of different opportunities to understand how the brain works, from how cells come together to form circuits that allow us to think, to how they break apart though degenerative diseases,” he said.
That the two scientists reached different conclusions based on the same data offers insight into how the human mind works — touching on the topics of perception and attention — and sets up what follows in the rest of exhibition, Colón-Ramos said.
What we pay attention to is very important for how we perceive reality and what enters our consciousness, and we can only pay attention to a few things at a time.
“We pivot from there to talking about perception and how we can see something but perceive it differently from others based on our context and background, which is exactly what was happening between the two scientists,” he said.
Exiting the opening section, visitors immediately come upon what looks to be a bust of Albert Einstein. Eerily, the great physicist’s face appears to follow them as they move. On closer inspection, what seems to be a sculpture is revealed to be the hollow interior of a mask. When visitors look at the mask’s convex exterior side, the appearance of movement disappears.
One of several baffling illusions on view, the mask shows how the brain uses experience and common sense to construct reality, Colón-Ramos said.
“Your brain is constantly reinterpreting and reconstructing the mask, which is ambiguous, and this makes it seem like it’s following you,” he said. “The convex side doesn’t follow you because your brain has managed to correctly identify it and how the light interacts with it, so it no longer has to create the image of a mask in your perception.”
In this illusion, the faces appear normal when upside down, but turning them right-side-up reveals that they are distorted.
Attention influences perception, Colón-Ramos explained.
“What we pay attention to is very important for how we perceive reality and what enters our consciousness,” Colón-Ramos said. “And we can only pay attention to a few things at a time.”
People eventually weave what they have paid attention to into narratives called memories, which are the source of our knowledge, skills, nostalgia, creativity, fears, and dreams, he explained.
An interactive exhibit in a section on memory asks children to write down their earliest memories on colored pieces of paper, which they can post on wall. The exercise touches on infantile amnesia, which is the inability of most adults to remember events from before the age of three or four.
As children record their memories, their parents often start sharing their memories of them as babies, Colón-Ramos said.
“It’s really sweet,” he said.
