B+HARI WAYFINDER

A Six-Week Neuroscience-Led Navigation Practice Through Art

B+HARI is excited to introduce WAYFINDER, a new six-week neuroscience-led navigation practice through art, created as part of our work with the Honolulu Museum of Art and the “Vital Connections: Art & the Brain”.

SIX WEEKS | $600

Dates: Wednesdays: November 11, 18, 25, December 2, 9, 16

Time: 4:00-6:00 pm, check in 4-4:15p, programming to start at 4:15

Location: Vital Connections: Art & the Brain Exhibit

Class Size: 20 students

WHAT IS WAYFINDER?

Wayfinder begins with a simple idea: choose one work of art and build an entire world within it to support cognitive health and adaptability.

Over six weeks, participants return to that world again and again, experiencing it from different perspectives. You will draw it from another viewpoint, build a bird’s-eye map, create and remember landmarks, change your orientation, navigate routes from memory, imagine what exists beyond the edges of the artwork, and eventually transform the world you have created into story.

Each week adds another layer. A picture becomes a place. A place becomes a map. A map becomes a world you can navigate, remember and reimagine.

Along the way, B+HARI combines drawing with movement, balance, sensory experiences, memory, imagination and changing perspectives through our 360° GPS Internal Spatial Map Training. No drawing experience or knowledge of neuroscience is needed. The activities are designed to be playful, surprising and accessible. Just bring your curiosity.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND WAYFINDER

Some of the inspiration for Wayfinder comes from the remarkable studies of London taxi drivers, who learn to navigate an extraordinarily complex network of streets and landmarks without relying on GPS. UCL research found measurable differences in the hippocampus of these expert navigators, including greater gray matter volume in the posterior hippocampus, a region deeply involved in spatial navigation and memory.

At the opening of Vital Connections, Catherine Whitney, HoMA’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, B+HARI Co-Founder and CEO Ma Ry Kim, and Professor Hugo Spiers, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Principal Investigator of the Spatial Cognition Lab at University College London (UCL), came together for the keynote to explore the relationship between art, space, navigation, memory and the brain. Professor Spiers and his colleagues have continued to investigate what extraordinary navigators such as London taxi drivers can teach us about how the brain adapts through experience.

Wayfinder asks: What if we could challenge some of these same navigation systems in a museum setting? B+HARI is exploring how the brain activation and network stacking involved in human spatial navigation can be challenged within an entirely different environment: ART.

The goal is to translate principles from spatial navigation neuroscience into joy-based art experiences that engage multiple neural network systems together, creating conditions that can support neuroplasticity and strengthen cognitive adaptability. Rather than training one ability in isolation, Wayfinder asks the brain and body to continually integrate information, adapt, change perspective and find new ways through a problem.

The six-week journey culminates in a private gallery experience with members of the Honolulu Museum of Art curatorial team and B+HARI scientific team, returning to the museum and the artwork where the journey began.

SUPPORTING OTHERS

Participation also helps sponsor places in the Wayfinder program for members of our kūpuna community, as well as on-going B+HARI applied research programs. 

B+HARI extends a special thank you to the Honolulu Museum of Art and its extraordinary team for their incredible partnership and support, and for opening the museum and its collection as a place where we can continue exploring the connections between art, the brain and human experience.