Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

The survey will involve groups of volunteers starting from the end of September

Milan, July 6 2022 – The Museum of Natural History and the Gallery of Modern Art, Milanese civic museums, have joined the ASBA (Anxiety, Stress, Brain-friendly museum, Approach) experimental project, designed and coordinated from the Center for Studies on the History of Biomedical Thought (CESPEB) of the University of Milan-Bicocca.

Already in 2018, Canadian general practitioners began prescribing a visit to the museum as a therapy to improve physical and mental well-being. Belgium has also recently started a pilot study following the Canadian example, in order to study the role that museums can play in improving people's quality of life.

In Italy, the ASBA (Anxiety, Stress, Brain-friendly museum, Approach - anxiety, stress, brain-friendly museum approach) pilot project starts in Milan, an interdisciplinary program which aims to use collections and museums as a venue for election to stimulate the well-being of the community through Mindfulness, Art therapy, Visual thinking strategies, the Art up method and the experimental strategy based on the mix of cultural heritage and nature.

Each of these methods will be analyzed in an art museum and in a scientific museum to demonstrate that these strategies are applicable and effective in different contexts (Art up, on the other hand, can only be applied to art museums). Each meeting will be divided into four moments: the informative part, the experiential part in front of the museum objects, the explanation of the same and a final debate. At the beginning and end of each meeting, anxiety and stress levels will be measured by means of standardized tests and user-friendly tools that detect the physiological indices of the participants.

The GAM and the Natural History Museum, starting from the end of September, will therefore make available some rooms where researchers from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", the University of Milan and qualified therapists will apply different methods of investigation to groups of people who will participate on a voluntary basis. Each group will be made up of ten people for an experience lasting approximately two hours.

"Thanks to the contribution of this experimentation, civic institutes will be able to transform themselves into a social and emotional space where art and science can become an opportunity for people, cultures and experiences to meet – declared the councilor for Culture Tommaso Sacchi –. A museum , in fact, brings together many functions, including the search for ever new ways to enhance one's collections in constant connection with one's audience, its needs and its growth needs".

ASBA was born from a project by Annalisa Banzi described in the book The brain-friendly museum. Using psychology and neuroscience to improve the visitor experience (in press, Routledge publisher).