In May, I spent a day at the Museum of Science and exploring downtown Boston. What caught my attention at the museum wasn’t the IMAX or the dinosaur. Instead, I saw that the exhibits are full of brain teasers designed to nudge us out of our everyday assumptions about science and nature.
If you walk through the exhibit called “A Bird’s World,” you’ll see the museum staff have avoided labeling some of the birds. A sign comments wryly that birds don’t have name tags in the wild.
Strolling toward the Natural Mysteries exhibit, you can look to the right – near the door – and see a wall-mounted board inviting you to play a guessing game. You can lift up different flaps labeled with descriptions and find surprising information underneath them. Lifting one flap, labeled “an animal,” shows people their own faces in a mirror.
The Natural Mysteries exhibit asks visitors to imagine they’ve woken up on the shore of a desert island. The “island” takes up an entire corner of the room. The challenge? Using a list of shells from different parts of the world, figure out where you’ve landed.
Other challenges throughout the room include identifying when a deserted schoolhouse was built; learning which mammal skulls are which; and understanding mountain lions by reading their footprints.
Just when you think you’ve escaped the brain teasers by going up to the second floor, the Seeing is Deceiving exhibit is waiting to confound you. The artwork consists of a series of images which change their appearance depending on one’s location and perspective.
If you’re getting tired of thinking after staring at the Mobius strip in the Mathematica exhibit, you can spend a few minutes in the butterfly garden taking in the sunshine. Make sure there aren’t any orange and blue hitchhikers hanging onto your jacket when you leave.
A butterfly close-up from Boston.com
Kat Friedrich 