Valeria Mongelli

I have been working as a neuroscientist for about six years. Every day, I was dealing with testing subjects, recording brain data, and making statistical analyses. Objects like electroencephalograms, helmets, and electrodes were part of my everyday life. Still, seen from the outside, these objects are quite uncommon. The same holds for scientific research, which is full of practices that sound nonsense to an outsider. Researchers spend years of their lives working on problems that may seem completely detached from the everyday world. Academia feels like a weird, dystopian bubble sometimes. In this series, I tried to capture this sense of weirdness, treating research tools as mysterious objects that come alive to question the observer. All pictures were taken at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.