I am enamored of the experimental way some museums are re-examining the visitor experience, especially the launch yesterday* of a Vincent van Gogh iPhone application at the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam. Viewing art is often a passive, spectator activity, which I why I am always captivated by creative explorations of art and artistic spaces. Museums often suffer, or perpetuate, the public’s perceptions of them as aloof and haughty. A modern audience is entitled to expect a greater degree of engagement using methods fit for the 21st century, in tandem with the traditional reflective personal perusal of the artwork. The advent of new technologies and creative collaboration between institutions, artists and the public has allowed a unique and refreshing rediscovery of museum attendance.

A few years ago, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design, curated a sensory exploration of that venerable institution called “Shhh…” The museum commissioned 10 different musicians and artists to create sound-pieces in response to different rooms and spaces. The contributors were incredibly varied, from big art names like Gillian Wearing and Jeremy Deller, to musicians like Roots Manuva, David Byrne, Leila and Elizabeth Fraser. Infrared sensors triggered the applicable tracks on the your MP3 player as you toured the building. The whole experience was stunning.

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What do you see when you sleep? Do you record your dreams? Are you integrating your conscious self with your unconscious psyche? In short, are you plumbing your dream world to find your soul?

The unconscious dreamworld of the acclaimed Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, is to be revealed publicly for the first time. The New York Times Magazine had a fine article last weekend about the forthcoming publication of Jung’s Red Book, a seemingly meticulous, revealing and graphically recorded tour through years of Jung’s personal dreams. This would be of interest generally given the comprehensive and aesthetically appealing work, but it is of deeper importance when one considers that Jung is one of the last century’s great psychologists and the founder of contemporary archetypal thinking.

There are, obviously, similarities between Jung’s Red Book and Federico Fellini’s Book of Dreams, which the Jungian analyst Ernst Bernhard, encouraged Fellini to maintain. Fellini duly noted and illustrated his own oneiric existence over thirty years and this exhibition at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences informatively introduced that work. (more…)

Luscious lips. A kissable mouth. A sensuous smile. Advertisers are now exploring the potency of physical attraction to compel consumers towards their products. Recently, Diageo approached the bio-statistician Dr. Kendra Schmid of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, as Diageo looked to perfect their Baileys brand “Listen to your lips” campaign; selecting lips that had the most, well, sex appeal.

Dr. Schmid is uniquely qualified to help having developed cutting edge research on the science of attraction, including identifying the characteristics that identify faces and lips to which we are most attracted. (more…)

A compelling interview recently on National Public Radio (read/listen to it here) got me thinking about the power of language to influence the way we think. Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist at Stanford, asserted a connection between the language that we use and the way it makes us perceive the world around us. Her experiment involved testing how separate groups who spoke German and Spanish used verbs to describe a bridge. The German speakers, in whose language a “bridge” has a feminine gender, used words like “beautiful,” “slender” and “elegant,” while the Spanish speakers, in whose language a “bridge” has a masculine gender used words like “strong,” “sturdy” and “towering.”

To further test her hypothesis that people’s thoughts were impacted by their language, Boroditsky invented a language called Gumbuzi. Her findings indicated that people’s grammatical understanding did affect their sense of the world around them.

This is a developing area of science and there are a number of viewpoints on this topic. For marketers, it does raise the issue about how we can use language as part of our copy messaging to arouse or induce certain unconscious perspectives in our target audience, especially where regional dialects may be in play. I’d be interested if you copy writers out there have any experience or opinion of this phenomenon. Let me know …

This is Part II of the post from Wednesday regarding UNMC’s Science Café. Part I is here. Continuing below is the other half of Dr. Singh’s six astonishing examples of recent and mind-blowing developments in our understanding of the brain and the mind.

4 – Anosognosia or “denying your weakness” is a fascinating and disturbing revelation. A patient who was paralyzed on one side of his body denied that he was paralyzed. On being asked to clap his hands, the patient proceeded to wave one hand in the air, as if clapping both together. Subsequent enquiry led the patient to affirm that he did clap and heard it too! Another accidental discovery resulted, by way of a treatment that also produces rapid eye movement. While the patient experienced rapid eye movement, he stopped denying his paralysis! As soon as the rapid eye movement ceased, he reverted to a denial of his paralysis. (more…)