Daily Magazine

At the American Museum of Natural History’s Senses exhibit in New York, there is a room that is completely wallpapered in squiggly black lines, including the floor and ceiling. It’s otherwise a normal room: six sides, two doors. One door is an entrance that warns visitors of potential dizziness, which I scoff at. Me, dizzy? In a room? Pssh. I stepped in without a second thought.

On that cold January afternoon, the squiggly room owned me. As soon as I entered, the squiggly black lines came to life, snaking and pulsing and making me trip. I’m clumsy, sure, but this was a flat room. The lines weren’t uniform, and depending on how they were spaced, some “moved” more than others. Intellectually, I knew the room wasn’t moving. But something deep within me disagreed viciously, and I stumbled out of the room before I threw up.

Robert DeSalle, a genomics expert who curated the exhibit and wrote Our Senses: An Immersive Experience, said that my overconfidence entering the room of squiggly lines was indicative of the fact that we humans are way too confident about the superiority of our senses.

“Our neural range of processing, compared to animals, is not really good,” DeSalle said. Translation: Our senses and how we perceive our space sucks.