Emotions are controlled by the levels of different chemicals in your brain. At any given moment, dozens of chemical messengers, or neurotransmitters, are active. but there is no one “love” or “hate” chemical. Some of these neurotransmitters go between individual cells, while others are broadcast to entire brain regions. By layering signals on other signals, your brain can adjust your responses and can effectively alter your mood.
In the Museum exhibition Brain: The Inside Story, visitors can try out an interactive exhibit that illustrates how neurotransmitters work, find out the difference between our “lizard brain” and our “mammal brain,” and learn more about the emotional brain.
In the video below, exhibition co-curator Rob DeSalle talks about how the brain processes emotion. Brain: The Inside Story is open now through Sunday, August 14.
The fusing of the senses — a fascinating neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia — is one of the topics explored in the major exhibition Brain: The Inside Story. It’s also the focus of Fulldome, an eye-popping work of light and sound by Joshua Light Show that will be performed in the Hayden Planetarium for three nights only from Friday, June 3, to Sunday, June 5 (a visit to the exhibition is included before each performance; click below for a tour of “Your Sensing Brain,” the section of the exhibition that features examples of synesthesia.)
Below, Curator Rob DeSalle, who curated Brain:The Inside Story, explains how the brain processes visual and audio cues and offers some classic examples of synesthesia. On Saturday, June 4, as part of the World Science Festival, DeSalle will also host the program “Illuminating Light,” with a sampling of the Joshua Light Show and presentations by the Museum’s Director of Astrovisualization Carter Emmart and Columbia neuroscientist Joy Hirsch, who consulted on the exhibition.
Brain: The Inside Story features a section about “Your Sensing Brain.” What parts of the brain are used to detect and process audio and visual stimuli?
While there are specific regions of the brain that have classically been tied directly to functions like seeing (occipital region) and hearing (auditory region), the processing of information for these two senses is complex. Let’s take sight for example. Parts of the brain that are quite distant from each other have to act in unison to produce what we commonly know as sight. First, light waves from the outside world are picked up by cells (rods and cones) in the retina of the eye. The light waves are converted to electrochemical impulses and are transmitted via the optic nerve to a part of the brain called the thalamus. The thalamus is kind of like a quarterback of a football team because it controls the dispersal of information to other regions of the brain. Next, the information is processed by various regions of the brain. Visual elements like lines, shapes, color, and motion are detected by these regions of the brain and synthesized into a meaningful representation of the image the eyes first took in. Finally, the image is given meaning by linking the parts of the brain that interpret the physical attributes of the image to regions of the brain where memories, thoughts, and emotions are processed to help you understand what you see. Read more »
How do drugs and drug use impact the brain? In this podcast from a recent SciCafe, Carl Hart, Associate Professor at Columbia University, shared his latest research and his sometimes surprising findings.
The program kicked off with an introduction by Rob DeSalle, Curator in the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology and curator of the ongoing exhibition “Brain: The Inside Story.”
On Thursday, January 20, neuroscientist Paul Glimcher of New York University and Rob DeSalle, curator of Brain: The Inside Story, will discuss the interdisciplinary field of neuroeconomics and how the brain enables humans to evaluate decisions, categorize risks and rewards, and interact with each other. Glimcher, whose books include Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain and Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis, recently answered a few questions about the discipline.
What is neuroeconomics?
Neuroeconomics is a highly synthetic and interdisciplinary effort to understand how both humans and animals make decisions.
What role does neuroeconomics play in our daily lives?
Decisions — the events that neuroeconomists seek to understand and predict — are embedded every aspect of our lives: what to have for breakfast, who to marry, or where to invest our retirement accounts. We make these choices effortlessly, but how? Over the last decade the basic outlines of the answer to that question have begun to become clear and the answers are surprising, exciting, and at times even troubling. It now seems clear that every day, at every action, our brains unconsciously compute and store the values of every event that befalls us. So I would have to say: neuroeconomics is our daily lives. Read more »
The human brain is sometimes described as the world’s most complex structure. Today, advances in biochemistry and new technologies that allow us to watch the brain in action are revealing more than ever before.
In this podcast, the scientists behind the special exhibition, Brain: The Inside Story, present a master class on all things brain. Join the discussion on topics ranging from neural evolution to the latest in brain-imaging technology.
Speakers, in order of appearance, include neuroscientist psychoanalyst Maggie Zellner of The Rockefeller University; Rob DeSalle, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History; and Joy Hirsch, director of the Program for Imaging & Cognitive Sciences at Columbia University.
