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Richard O. Brown
Richard O. Brown, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist. He has degrees in neurobiology from Caltech and the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and he was on UC San Diego’s research faculty in the Center for Brain and Cognition before joining the Exploratorium in 1998. Richard’s specialty is perception and psychophysics, and in particular the science and art of human color perception. He is also an internationally recognized expert on visual illusions and demonstrations and has taught visual perception at both UCSD and the San Francisco Art Institute. At the Exploratorium, he was the primary developer or co-developer of almost 100 new exhibits on topics including seeing, listening, attention, biology, AIDS and immunology, the human body, the outdoors, and the mind. He is devoted to applying knowledge from neuroscience and psychology to the problems of human behavior in the climate change crisis.
Related Exhibits
Adapting to Color
Change your perception of color by flooding your eyes with colored light.
Animation Tower
Quick-changing views create the illusion of motion.
Benham's Disk
When the disk is spun, the colors you see are illusions. This effect was popularized in 1894 by toymaker C. E. Benham, who called his spinning disk an “artificial spectrum top."
Where: Crossroads: Getting Started
Bird in a Cage
Stare at a bird’s eye for 30 seconds, then look into the empty cage. You’ll see a ghostly bird—of a very different color—inside the cage
Bright Black
At this exhibit, find out how subjective brightness can be as you struggle—and fail—to correctly decide whether the squares you see are black or white.
Colored Shadows
Step in front of this wall, and you’ll make shadows of various colors—yellow, magenta, cyan, red, green, blue, and yes, even black—that wiggle, jump, and dance along with you.
What's Hot, What's Not?
At this exhibit, an infrared camera detects the heat radiating from warm objects and projects it on a big screen, allowing you to see what’s hot (and not) about you and the other people and objects in your surroundings.
Where: Crossroads: Getting Started
