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Mindscapes



This area of the exhibition is dedicated to probably the greatest natural phenomenon anywhere: human perception. Here, you can experience yourself as a phenomenon.

Amazing experiments show how sensory stimuli and perception are connected and which individual mindscape the brain constructs in this process. Many exhibits will surprise you even as you walk by them: you won't discover what your brain is automatically trying to correct until you are just a few steps away from the Reversed Perspective exhibit, for example.

And because dialogue is often the only way to verify much of what we believe to be our perception, the exhibition as a whole is presented in a highly interactive way. So, prepare to be especially fascinated by the Machine to be another with which you can find out how it probably feels to be in another person's shoes.

The Rotating Tunnel that pinpoints the role of sight in keeping your balance is a particularly great exhibit for visitors with a strong stomach! The Ames Room and the Distorted Room will also amaze and fascinate visitors with optical illusions.
Exhibit-Links
11798 Detail II

3D-Shadows

Shadows gain depth. Illuminated with red and green light, a tetrahedron casts a red and a green shadow on the screen. Viewed through glasses with red and…

11747 Detail

Alike and unalike

The illusion of inequality. Two identical wooden arcs lie side by side. The inner one appears larger, but it isn’t. For circular arcs, the outer edge is…

11762 Detail

Ambiguous Figures

Clearly ambiguous. One object, two forms: “Necker cubes” belong to the category of ambiguously perceivable objects. Perceiving spatial dimensions and depth:…

11763 11813 Detail I

Changing Sides

A wire cube rotates in front of a mirror. If you squint one eye and fix a front corner of the wire cube, you see a certain direction of rotation. If you now…

11559 Haupt

Circular Deformations

Patterns come to life. Ovals form around stationary circles. Funnels emerge, cones rise. Curved lines perform a serpentine dance. Images that, when observed…

10231 Haupt

Circular Deformations

Geometric shapes come to life. What we think we see in the shapes of spinning discs! Ovals wrapping around stationary circles. Cones wobbling in a…

11749 Detail II

Coarse or Fine

Texture and perception. One hand strokes coarse sandpaper. The other hand strokes fine sandpaper. Then both hands simultaneously stroke sandpaper with medium…

11809 Detail

Cold Test

Four degrees – only relatively cold. Touch the metal rods, please. Yes, they’re really cold. Almost painful. How painful is this brief contact? This…

11744 Phänomen I

Crooked Tiles

Cafe Wall Illusion: the tile deception. These parallel lines really seem tilted! The black and white squares can be arranged in stripes or offset into a…

11812 Haupt

Delayed Viewing

Acting and seeing with a time delay. Catching fish with a fishing line: normally, it’s simple enough, as the magnet on the line is easy to guide. But it gets…

11765 Detail

Dialog in the Vase

Vase with two faces. At some point, the image flips: first, it’s a vase. It rotates. Wait! There are two faces. Two people talking to each other. Two…

11794 Unused

Different Discs

Estimating and weighing. Visual context and the expectations it creates: wood is lighter than metal, obviously. Or is it? What weight do we expect when…

11477 Haupt

Distorted Room (Ames Room)

Little one grows tall. An absolutely ordinary room, at least when viewed through the peephole. But wait, the little brother grows taller than the big sister…

11741 Detail

Face Wipe

Swipe – and the face is gone. A single movement of the hand is enough for a face to disappear, partially or completely. The installation “Erase-A-Face” plays…

11755 Haupt

Feeling Eyes

Sometimes round, sometimes oval. With eyes closed and explored by touch, the bowl feels oval. Viewed through the lens and touched, it appears – depending on…

11745 Haupt

Feeling for Weight

Form influences expectation. Size-weight illusion: the upper of two stacked boxes appears heavier than both boxes combined. Estimating weight and lifting: in…

10431 Detail

Floating Rings

Magical: Three rings floating in perfect balance. That they appear to balance like spinning coins is an illusion. The rings are firmly connected to one…

11816 Unused

Fragrance Memory

In a number of identical looking smelling containers there are pairs of different scents, pleasant and unpleasant. The task is to find these pairs. In…

11817 Detail

Fragrance Wheel of Fortune

Scent and emotion: what effect does each smell have? Spin the wheel and smell when it stops. As a "prize," pleasant or unpleasant scents. Delighted or…

11748 Haupt

Gentle Hands

Fine, yet coarse mesh. Perceiving structures: one hand strokes a coarse grid. The other hand strokes a fine mesh. Then both hands simultaneously stroke a grid…

11804 Detail

Hollow Head

Only has eyes for you. One step to the left, three to the right, stretch upward a little, bend down: there’s no escape. Those eyes follow you…

11750 Detail

Hot - Cold

Can something be hot and cold at the same time? The copper coil is warm on one side and cold on the other. Our temperature receptors detect this immediately…

11806 Haupt

I

The world in your head. A room free of distractions, without contrasts or contours: the entire field of vision is exposed to a single constant, homogeneous…

11808 Haupt

I You Us

Five faces – one world. A stimulating exploration of themes such as freedom, feelings of belonging, or emotions like shyness or embarrassment: who will you…

10535 Haupt

Impossible Nuts

A perfectly straight pencil that wiggles. When the brain resists what the eye sees: it seems impossible for the pencil to move through the two nuts in such a…

11756 Haupt

Inclined Chess

Big and bulky for some – small and slim for others. A completely messed-up chess set, right? Agreed? Almost. The chessboard is perfectly level. The pieces…

11810 Haupt

Look in the Clouds

Clouds drift by – shapes emerge. The phenomenon of pareidolia: when watching the drifting clouds on the large screen for a while, we see animals, objects, and…

11760 Detail

Make two into one

A new look at familiar faces. Three of you are sitting at a table. One person is looking into two mirrors. With the right eye, they see the person sitting to…

11754 Detail

Movement Blindness

Here just a moment ago. Now gone. Above a rotating pattern, objects are present – and then vanish. Our brain weights and interprets moving and stationary…

11793 Detail

Never-Ending Scale

When the scale descends infinitely… Listen closely, press a key, then the next – and compare. At first glance, identifying the highest note seems easy. Which…

10335 Haupt

Pinna illusion

Perceiving movement in a static image. Two concentric circles are made up of tilted rectangles, rotated in opposite directions. When approaching or stepping…

11791 Haupt

Push Over

Now stay steady. Standing on one leg – nothing could be easier. But is it still true when the panel with vertical stripes moves back and forth? This throws…

11802 Haupt

Reversed Perspective

Art gallery reveals contradictions. This three-dimensional spatial sculpture completely overturns our visual habits. It flips the space by presenting elements…

10412 Haupt

Rising or Falling

Interpreting signals of position and balance. When the platform lowers and the column elongates: how does the brain interpret the messages from tactile cells…

11629 Detail I

Rotating Tunnel

Hold on! Walking on solid ground, like on a swaying ship. Standing stable, walking upright on flat ground: nothing could be easier. Or is it? The rotating…

11803 Phänomen

Separated Fingers

Are these mine? The fingers under the mirror look strange. And they feel strange too; like objects or peculiar creatures. The brain trusts the eyes more than…

11764 Haupt

Sloping Room

And the ball rolls – uphill. Step right in! Are you standing steady? A normal room with normal furniture, and yet it creates a strange feeling. The reason is…

11746 Detail

Smell Habituation

Even strong scents fade eventually. In a mixture of a strong and a weak scent, we only smell the strong one – the dominant scent. If we smell the strong scent…

11740 Haupt

Spot the Difference

Blind with eyes wide open. Click – and a detail in the image changes. Noticed it? Probably not. And if so, more by chance. Change blindness: when we look at…

11818 Phänomen I

Squaring the Circle

Everything always has two sides. From one side, it looks like a square; from the other, a circle. It’s all a matter of viewpoint and perspective. The…

11795 Detail

The Eyes help you lift

This exhibit is about the conflict between the visual situation and what I expect from it, how the weights feel, and the feeling when I actually lift the…

11752 Detail

The Odours of Things

Seeing, smelling, evaluating. Cheese? Pleasant. Smelly socks? Unpleasant! Correct – but not here. Visual context strongly influences how smells are perceived.

11772 Detail

The separated Self

Right hand: the left hand. Left hand: the right hand. A glance from the right side into the mirror: Yes, that's the left hand. You move your left hand: but it…

11792 Detail

Three Chairs

A different perspective: spatial perception. Looking through the peephole reveals three chairs. Only one is built as we would expect. A side view into the…

11815 Haupt

Three-dimensional Projection

3D – the cinema is made by the brain. From red and green shadows, plastic, three-dimensional objects emerge. Viewed through glasses with red and green…

10041 Haupt

Treadmill After Effect

This experiment consists of three parts, a pilot phase, an experimental phase and a test phase. In the pilot phase, people "jog" in place for 30 seconds with…

11796 Haupt

Tricky Curves

Reorienting in space. In us, vision and movement are closely interconnected: we see where things are and simultaneously sense where our body is in space.…

11763 11813 Detail I

Turning Shadow

Playing with the Pulfrich effect: perceiving a two-dimensional image as three-dimensional. Through the Pulfrich glasses, the shadow of the cube gains depth.…

11751 Haupt

Vomit, Grass and Candyfloss

Different scents, a surprising sum. Scents evoke specific feelings, moods, and memories in us. How they are perceived and judged varies individually and…

11797 Detail I

Waterfall Effect (Rotating Spirals)

Vision happens primarily in the brain. Spiral patterns seem to fold in and out as this disc rotates. If we focus on a stationary object, it suddenly appears…

11800 Haupt

Welcome to Sector K… ?

This is how we read, this is how we understand written text. A letter is missing, the word is misspelled – and yet, we immediately understand what is…

11389 Haupt

What does she say?

The McGurk Effect: hearing with your eyes. Four faces appear on a screen, speaking simultaneously. Depending on which face we focus on, we hear a different…

11739 Haupt

Wide of the Mark

Throwing a ball through a ring: easy. Even with these glasses? The glasses shift the field of vision. The ball is now likely to miss its target. By…

11807 Haupt

You and I

Feelings of closeness. There’s a head, a face, just 35 centimeters away. A distance that normally belongs to the personal intimate zone. What sensations does…

10867 Detail

«Poppier»

When walls wobble. Reversed perspective: it turns our visual habits upside down. The three-dimensional sculptural painting “Poppier” practically flips spaces…

thema-Links

Biology

Senses

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Main Aktivität Sterben und Leben

Dying and living

What makes biology so exciting? Life itself - it is tricky, adaptable, merciless, unpredictable. This topic is worthy of its own area at Technorama. The…

10124 Haupt

Light and sight

Learn how light brings the world alive for us.