The project's theatrical format and structure is a metaphor for how the unconscious mind is the unheralded
producer in our “mental theater”. Our higher levels of consciousness is the theater of the mind’s audience,
but this audience has little or no control over the production. In this exhibition, our illusions—of all
types—perceptual, cognitive and social, will be experienced consciously. Visitors will be aware of their own
biases and illusions. And, as such, these can be recognized and altered.
The experience is unconventional —it combines elements of art installation and theatre with real science
and authentic museum objects in ways that are entertaining, engaging and unprecedented. The scale is
broad—in order to truly allow the visitors to intuitively grasp the implications of how individual sensory biases
may be unconscious but strongly deterministic of our social interactions.
The experience tells a story —The Institute is the conceptual framework for linking current experiments and
demonstrations from a range of leading research laboratories from around the world. This will allow for a
range of approaches to be curated into a compelling cohesive narrative for how our brains build our worlds.
The Institute Fellows are actors will be the animators, engaging and assisting our visitors through the rooms
so that insights regarding who we are, and of what we are fully capable, will be intuited rather than told.
Visitors will absorb through experience.
AUTORI
IMMAGINI
Plant of the visitors tour
NOTE AGGIUNTIVE
The world we create is not the real world, but it is our inventive means of building a world that works for us and then deciding how to act inside that imagined realm. We are, therefore, all creativeoften without even realizing itand by end of the experience, visitors will see how these creative assumptions affect how we harmoniously relate to other people. The Institute invites visitors to viscerally experience how our brains construct the world, through a highly engaging sequence of cognitive neuroscience experiments created in
collaboration with, or based on, the work of neuroscience labs around the world. The Institute is presented in three parts (or acts):
? Act I: Senses
? In the first part, we will see some surprising examples of how our brains perceiveusing the information that comes from our eyes, ears and bodies. We will see how our brains quickly and efficiently construct an image of the world that works for us. It is not 100% accurate, in the objective sense, but given our neural resources, it works beautifully for most of our purposes.
? Act II: Cognition
? In the second part, visitors will experience how we mostly unconsciously process that information.
Visitors will experience how easily The Institute can alter our attention, affect our memories, and demonstrate the significantly unconscious nature of many of our supposedly conscious actions with implications for the assumption of free will. The latter has large implications for justice and law.
? Act III:Society
? In the third section, visitors will see how these biases mirror how we relate to other peopleour social interactions are similar to our perceptual and cognitive constructions. Visitors will experience how one can predict election results based simply on faces, how we have biases regarding others we may not want or even realize we have, our inbuilt sense of fairness to those in our tribes, the privileged position we give to those in our own communities, the limits of our
morality and lastly, a large scale mission game that will allow us to possibly cooperate and build a sustainable society.
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