Barbara Stafford, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of the University of Chicago's Department of Art History, discusses the relationship between art museums and neuroscience. **Barbara Stafford**'s recent essays focus on how developments in brain science are informing our assumptions about perception, emotion, sensation, and mental imagery. She is currently writing a cognitive history of images. Stafford is the writer of many books, including *Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine* (1991), *Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education* (1994), and *Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting* (1999).
Barbara Maria Stafford is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, at the University of Chicago. Her work has consistently explored the intersections between the visual arts and the physical and biological sciences from the early modern to the contemporary era. Her current research charts the revolutionary ways the neurosciences are changing our views of the human and animal sensorium, shaping our fundamental assumptions about perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and subjectivity. Staffords most recent book is *Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images*, University of Chicago Press, 2007.