Braingineering

Have you ever wondered…What’s actually inside your head? How do you build a brain? Is your mind playing tricks on you? Braingineering is a set of fun teaching activities to stimulate thinking about each of these questions. The three activities are linked but can be done in any order so you can have a larger group divided into three, rotating round stations for each one. It is also interesting to see how groups approach the different tasks, depending on which ones they have done previously. The questions are broad and profound enough that they can easily be used in schools (we’ve used this with 11 – 12 year olds) all the way through to undergraduate courses – just adjust the level of detail you go into based on their starting knowledge. You can find lots of cool Braingineering merch in my RedBubble store

What’s inside your head?

We all know that our brain is in our head but how much of your head does it actually fill? If we could lift off the top of our skull like a lid, what would we see? What about the rest of your head, what’s inside there?

This first activity is a simple introduction to head anatomy, thinking about how much of the skull’s volume is filled by the brain and how this relates to other structures such as the nasal passage. If you poked a pencil up your nose, would it really go into your brain? Don’t try this at home!! Nasal exploration is best undertaken with a finger…

Provide a copy of this image of an empty head, either to each learner or in pairs. A3 copies of these images can be downloaded below in pdf format. You can print these on paper but if you have access to a laminator it’s much more environmentally friendly to laminate copies so they can be drawn on with whiteboard markers and reused. This also allows your budding anatomical artists to easily make changes to their drawing. Simply ask your audience to fill in the blank! They are usually quite comfortable filling the top of the head with a giant walnut brain but often less confident about how far down it comes. Similarly, a gap for the mouth is no problem but is the tongue really a ribbon? And what’s behind the nose? (Green pens are fun for this bit…)

I’ve included the image of the whole head because it can be helpful to have a copy to display as a reference before drawing on the empty ones.

How do you build a brain?

Across this website you will find lots of information about how the brain is built by axon guidance, the process by which nerves are wired up into circuits. This activity thinks more about the fully formed brain and how its different regions are joined up to function. Imagine you were building a robot brain, what input would it need to detect what is happening in the world around it? How would this information be stored so that it could be used later as memories to compare with other inputs? What information would need to be combined to make decisions and how would this output be communicated to the body? Thinking back to what’s in your head, once you had designed all these components, how would you arrange them within the brain? Would the visual processing systems sit just behind the eyes? Would you put the hearing module on the side and if so, on one side or both?

Inventor neuron

In How to Build a Brain, your task is to imagine you have to produce a system capable of hearing or reading a word and then speaking that word. You are provided with a set of cards, each one representing a part of the brain or the head. There is a short description on each card explaining what the component does with enough information to be able to work out how the various parts interact.

Everything you needed to know about the eye

This works well as a group activity, give each person one or two cards and each has to summarise theirs to the rest of the group. They must then work together to build a network by linking the key phrases on each card. Depending on the participants, some of the cards may show structures they have never heard of but there is still enough explanation that hopefully they can work out where they sit in the overall ‘machine’. Teams should lay out the cards on a table/floor/stick them on a board, showing how they link up. They could draw lines or pin string between them to show the connections.

Not everyone will have heard of Wernicke’s area.

Once they think they have all the necessary parts laid out, ask them to explain how it would work. How is the spoken word heard and how are these sound waves converted into neuronal signals that are understood as words? How does this happen for a written word? Let’s say the word was ‘flower’, where in the brain does this get understood as ‘flower’ irrespective or whether it was read or heard? Having done this, what systems then send that word to the vocal system to speak it in reply?

How do sounds become something we understand as words?

The key learning from this activity is how functions of the brain can be thought of as localised, for instance, in the visual cortex. At the same time, this alone is too simplistic, even basic actions require coordination of inputs and outputs across the whole brain. This demonstrates the distributed nature of information processing that constantly occurs. You can use this to lead on to many different questions depending on your learners and the context. One approach is to take each component in turn and discuss what would happen if it was damaged. How would this affect the ability to hear, read or say ‘flower’? What are the real conditions in which this happens and are there medical or technological ways we can repair or compensate for this loss?

Another interesting discussion can be had about how useful it is to define specific areas and to what extent they truly reflect function. This is particularly true of Broca and Wernicke’s areas. Despite the impression given by many neurology texts over the past century, not to mention many websites, there is still no consensus on exactly where they are. Both Broca and Wernicke made astute observations in the context of the time they were working and the tools available to them. We now know, from looking at many more cases using sophisticated imaging technology, that the parts of the brain involved in language comprehension and production extend beyond these areas. For a detailed explanation I recommend this review titled ‘Broca and Wernicke are dead…‘ which includes the pithy subheading ‘There is no consistent definition of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, and the terms should no longer be used’. Discuss…

There is a red herring, the olfactory nerve is included but is not relevant to the immediate task. There is a hint to this effect if your learners read the card carefully. However, whether they spot this or not, you can use this to prompt further discussion about how it would be relevant if you were asked to smell a flower and then say what you had sniffed. At some point I will expand the set of cards by including olfactory cortex so this can be directly included as a possibility. If you have any ideas about other parts to include – especially if they would look cool with a steampunk neuroanatomy vibe! – please use the contact form to let me know or message me on Twitter. Even just a line to say how you’ve used them is always appreciated.

You can download the full set of cards below (A5 size). If you want to look really professional you can print them double sided including page 1 each time – print p1 and p2 then p1 and p3 and so on. Having done that, why not go all out and laminate them too?!

Is your mind playing tricks on you?

The third activity delves into the psychology of how the function of the brain links to our conscience experience of the world and of ourselves. Optical illusions like this one (there are no actual triangles drawn in it) are well-known examples of how our brains can be fooled, often by input that doesn’t match what the brain is expecting. Much of our sensory perception and our movements rely on the brain making educated guesses about the world around us. Usually this helps us interact smoothly with our environment, to quickly recognise objects or to walk down a familiar flight of stairs in the dark without stumbling. When reality doesn’t match the best laid plans of your brain, you can end up surprised, confused or in plaster.

You’ll need to be a bit patient with me for this materials for this one, I’m still working on making them web friendly.

A big thanks is due to the many colleagues who have helped develop this resource and taken it to schools across the region. You can read about the fun we had at a local school here. Left to my own devices I’d still be tinkering with the drawings, so I’m very grateful to the friends who have sparked it into practical life. An extra round of fizzy drinks for Siobhan (@petiteanatomist) and Lily (@lilyaevans1) who are always finding new ways to make anatomy inclusive and accessible and to Dan (@Dr_DanielZ) the psychology guru who can materialise anywhere without warning.

Braingineering in action!