Hundreds of elementary, middle school students attend brain awareness event

Mary Guiden

Babies’ brains account for 13 percent of their weight. It would take more than 3,000 years to count the 100 billion nerve cells in a human brain. The weight of your brain has nothing to do with your intelligence.

More than 600 students learned those facts and more at the 18th annual Brain Awareness Week event at the University of Washington on Tuesday, March 3. Many of them had the chance to hold a real brain for the first time or have a neuron painted on their face, also, perhaps, for the first time.

Eric Chudler, research associate professor in the UW Department of Bioengineering, launched the first UW event in 1997. He continues to oversee the grassroots gathering, working with graduate students who help secure space in the Husky Union Building and line up departments and organizations as exhibitors.

The UW is one of hundreds of organizations around the world that host a Brain Awareness Week event; all of the events are supported by The Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic organization that backs brain research.

The official dates for Brain Awareness Week in 2015 are March 16 to 22, though many groups hold activities in the weeks leading up to or after that timeframe.

Raising awareness about research

As you may guess from its name, the event aims to increase understanding about brain-related research and neurological disorders. “It’s a time for neuroscientists to share what they’ve learned in the lab with the general public,” said Chudler, who serves as executive director at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.

The Center’s Kristen Bergsman showed youngsters how electromyography, or EMG, picks up electrical signals from muscles moving in your arm. Katherine Ingle, graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering, also showed kids how the Myo, a gesture control armband that uses EMG muscle sensors, works.

“A lot of kids probably didn’t even know that neural engineering exists,” Chudler said, in reference to the center’s research. “We are encouraging the next generation of scientists to pursue brain-related research and to learn more about it.”

Since the event first began, Chudler said there’s been a tremendous amount of new discoveries, new ways of imaging the brain, computing data and ways to analyze more data quickly.

His favorite part of the day is listening to the questions that the kids have. He also enjoys clearing up the brain-related misconceptions that students and even some teachers have. The most common is that we only use 10 percent of our brain. Another frequently-asked question: When the moon is full, why do people act abnormally? Both are myths.

Making it personal

What’s the best way to educate kids and adults about research? “Showing kids how personal it can get,” Chudler said. “We all wear helmets when we bike to protect our brains, as one example. Students may not realize it, but they probably know someone who has a problem with the nervous system. It’s common and, in some cases, preventable. Making brain research more personal gets them interested.”

More than two dozen organizations exhibited at the 2015 Brain Awareness Week event, including the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, UW Department of Biology, UW School of Nursing, the DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology) Program, Seattle Hydrocephalus Foundation and Epilepsy Foundation Northwest.