MOSH curator Ryan Enger talks about the museum's new MindWorks exhibit, on the second floor through May. | Dan Scanlan, Florida Today
Published on January 30, 2025 at 9:01 pm
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The huge display on the Pac-Man game flashes the question, “Do you play fair?” It’s one of the questions that Jacksonville’s Museum of Science and History hopes to get us thinking about with a new exhibit called MindWorks that opens on Saturday.
The traveling exhibit brings brain functions like decision-making, memory and emotion to life through interactive displays on the museum’s second floor.
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MOSH Curator Ryan Enger says the exhibit’s two-player Pac-Man game, which claims to be the world’s largest, is “really interesting” to watch being played.
“The players have to negotiate ahead of time how many seconds each of them is going to get to control it, and they have to agree before it will allow them to start playing,” Enger said. “So there’s all kinds of dynamics and thought questions. How much am I willing to give up to my partner? Is it different if they are my friend already or somebody I just met? And how do I decide how much is mine and how much should be theirs?”
MOSH, only the second site in the U.S. to host the exhibition, booked MindWorks two years ago, seeking a highly interactive program that has multi-generational appeal, and one which deals with psychology, Enger says. MindWorks was created by Ontario Science Centre in partnership with the Ontario Brain Institute.
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“Now more than ever, we all need everyone to be aware of how their own thoughts work and how their own thoughts affect the way they interact with others,” Enger says.
Interactive displays in the exhibit have visitors explore questions like What makes you, you?; Would you choose pain over boredom? and When you dream, are you still you? Others ask if you’ve been fooled by fake news, have turned off sad stories or whether you carry emotional baggage.
“There are 10 major areas of psychology that it addresses, several components under each of those,” Enger says. “It’s intended to lead guests through a process, whether it is their critical or creative thinking; how do I get into the zone in my flow of work; how does implicit bias affect my decisions; and why is that something that happens to everyone’s brain and we are not usually aware of it.”
One part lets people learn about the emotions their faces show, something that Enger said is “hardest to control.”
“It is designed to provoke and prompt reflection and discussion,” he said. “So you could come though this every day for the 107 days we have it here and have a slightly different experience, learn one more thing about your brain. Or if you are a younger learner, you can just enjoy punching buttons, pulling levers and have a grand time.”
MindWorks is one of the last new exhibits to be shown at MOSH before it breaks ground on its new, expanded museum on the Northbank. Opened in 1969 on the city’s Southbank, the museum plans to build a 130,000-square-foot facility on 2.5 acres of the Shipyards along East Bay Street, with a riverwalk and park space outside.
Construction cannot start until MOSH has the full funding to build it, because the museum wants to have all of the estimated $100 million on hand to finish it, Enger said.
“We are ahead of schedule and doing well,” he said. “We hit the milestone that was in the legal agreements, which was that we had to get $40 million (in private funding). We nailed that, surpassed that, and it’s full speed to ahead to the finish, and we are getting close.”
Once that happens, MOSH aims to break ground by the end of this year, and to complete the move across the river by 2028.
The new museum is part of massive redevelopment of the Northbank that includes a Four Seasons Hotel and office building under construction now, as well as a two-year, $1.4 billion renovation of EverBank Stadium. A 10-acre Shipyards West Park is planned next to the new MOSH and the USS Orleck, the retired U.S. Navy destroyer that serves as the floating Jacksonville Naval Museum. And final design is underway on a reimagined Metropolitan Park to the east of that, with a new Downtown fire station under construction now at the base of the Hart Bridge.
MindWorks is on display at MOSH until May 4.
