First,breathe: Rethinking neuroscience engagement at Glastonbury festival

This summer, with support from the BNA Local Groups, we delivered Senseshift, an interactive installation at Glastonbury Festival exploring neuroscience and mental health. The project invited visitors to marvel at the fallibility of perception and to reflect on what this means for us as individuals and as a society, while opening up conversations about stigmatised mental health conditions that affect perception. A brief summary of the project is available at: https://www.bna.org.uk/resource/senseshift-at-glastonbury.html. In this article, we reflect on three insights from the project, which could be useful for others working within neuroscience engagement.

First, breathe. The first component of our stall invited visitors to turn their attention to the sensation of their breath and heartbeat through an audio-guided grounding exercise. This activity drew on the concept of interoception, the perception of signals arising from within the body (Craig, 2003), which are linked to energy regulation, emotional experience and memory (Quigley et al., 2021). In our exhibition, the grounding exercise was intended primarily as a sensory demonstration; however, it also appeared to settle visitors into a more reflective state before engaging with the installation, supporting deeper engagement. This observation is consistent with research suggesting that interoceptive abilities are linked to emotional awareness and regulation (Füstös et al., 2013; Zamariola et al., 2019), suggesting that following this activity, visitors may have been more open to reconsidering prior assumptions. Therefore, we suggest that brief embodied activities may be useful in public engagement, especially when addressing sensitive or complex issues.

Reflecting as a team of clinicians, teachers and professional science communicators, we were struck by how different the interactions felt from spaces in which we had previously communicated science. Despite arriving at the festival as so-called experts, the hierarchy between us as facilitators and visitors felt markedly flatter, encountering visitors primarily as fellow festival-goers, instead of institutional representatives. As science engagement increasingly moves into informal cultural spaces (Stilgoe et al., 2014), festivals offer opportunities to reach audiences who might not otherwise attend science engagement events (Rosin et al., 2023) and represent environments where people feel more comfortable engaging with science (Leão and Castro, 2012). We argue that the festival environment contributed significantly to this dynamic.

The dynamic was also supported by an activity within the exhibition which utilised prompt cards combining short factual statements with open-ended questions about perception. Our team used the cards to facilitate conversations with visitors, encouraging them to interpret ideas through their own experiences. Facilitation rather than didactic teaching is increasingly recognised in both education (Harden and Crosby, 2000) and public engagement (Devonshire and Hathway, 2014). This shift, described as moving from “deficit” to a “dialogue” (Stilgoe et al., 2014), can support both improved public engagement (Gregory and Lock, 2008), as well as opportunities for mutual learning, recognising the value of the experiential knowledge of visitors (Reincke et al., 2020) and aligning with calls for “epistemic justice” in public involvement (Liabo et al., 2022). We argue that these opportunities are even more important within neuroscience and mental health, where lived experience of mental illness is becoming an ever more important part of education (Parnell et al., 2023), research (Okoroji et al., 2023) and policy (Olsen et al., 2025). Put simply, since many questions within neuroscience and mental health intersect with experiences shared across the population, to be more effective, neuroscience engagement should recognise and involve the experiential knowledge of participants. Therefore, we encourage approaches that actively invite and value the contributions of visitors alongside those of facilitators.

Finally, we reflect on our attempts to challenge mental health stigma around conditions that affect perception, such as psychosis and autism spectrum disorder. Despite increasing awareness, public stigma of mental illness remains an ongoing challenge, with a report suggesting public beliefs about people with mental illness have deteriorated within recent years (Mind and Centre for Mental Health, 2025). Recently, it has been argued that stigma campaigns struggle to produce lasting change due to inadvertently reinforcing categorical separation between people with mental illness and the general population: reinforcing an “us” and “them” narrative (Walsh and Foster, 2021). The activities within Senseshift therefore aimed to approach this challenge differently, highlighting that fallible and subjective perception is part of everyday experience, not only something associated with mental illness or neurodevelopmental conditions.

In practice, translating these ideas into discussion proved challenging. It felt important not to conflate everyday experiences with complex mental health conditions, and discussing mental illness within the emotionally heightened environment of a music festival required careful judgement, with some conversations becoming unexpectedly personal or distressing, which felt less appropriate in the space. Reflecting on this, we suggest that engagement with sensitive or stigmatised topics may be better supported by signposting visitors to further material to explore after the event.

Overall, Senseshift highlighted the importance of reflection, shared experience and openness in public engagement, underlining the challenges of discussing sensitive topics in informal settings. For those communicating neuroscience and mental health in public spaces, we suggest that creating conditions for thoughtful conversation may be as important as the information being communicated.