Excerpt from an article I wrote with my mentor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“One often meets successful adults, professionals, or scientists who recall that their lifelong vocational interest was first sparked by a visit to a museum. In these accounts, the encounter–with a real, concrete object from a different world an exotic animal, a strange dress, a beautiful artifact–is the kernel from which an entire career of learning grew. For others with an already developed curiosity about some field such as zoology, anthropology, or art, the museum provided an essential link in the cultivation of knowledge–a place where knowledge lost its abstractness and became concrete. In either case, many people ascribe powerful motivation to a museum visit, claiming that their desire to learn more about some aspect of the world was directly caused by it.”

The full article is available here: https://arts.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Csikszentmihalyi-Hermanson-1995_Intrinsic-Motivation-in-Museums.pdf