Brain Festival 2001

Charles Shapiro <Charles.Shapiro@p...> Date:\xA0 Mon\xA0Mar\xA026,\xA02001\xA0 1:54 pm Subject:\xA0 FW: Brainstorms at Scitrek!

The free "Brainstorms" gig from noon to five Saturday at Scitrek was at least as much fun as I'd hoped it would be. I arrived at noon, and Rosa (a member of this mailing list who hasn't been to a meeting yet) arrived shortly therafter. We held down the fort together for the first couple of hours, then Jonathan Perry, Sarah Ambro, Ron Anglin, and Bob McKee showed up to round out the afternoon.

Rosa's got a lot of potential. She has a small but growing vocabulary of 3-ball tricks, she's working on juggling clubs, and she has already done a couple of local shows around her school near Stone Mountain. She could benefit from some contact with other jugglers. Even though she hadn't seen steals or half-juggling, we were able to get 3-ball front steals working in 10 minutes or so. With a little pounding I think side steals and walk-arounds are not far away.

The coolest part of this gig was the chance to hang with actual scientists(!) -- well, grad students anyway. The 'brain fair' itself was more-or-less like a science fair, with between 10 and 15 booths manned by folks involved in neuroscience at Emory University. We had our own pet neurologist in Rick Segal, a director at Emory's Center for Rehabilitation Medicine. He told me that your visual reflexes are actually slower than your auditory ones because it takes time for the rhodopsin in your retina to saturate with light and initiate the chemical reactions which fire the nerve cell. He and his grad student were able to calculate the learned reaction time of one civilian with nothing more than a yardstick and a calculator. Very Fun.

Other highlights of the festival included a cool experiment on the sexual behavior of genetic knockout mice which shows that estrogen produced in the brain is critical for males to successfully mate, a keen camera gizmo which used a hardware cellular automaton to analyze visual information, and a "Your Brain On Drugs" booth which was refreshingly free of the usual foolish anti-recreational-drug hype and misinformation. They even had chocolate there.

But the most thrilling part of the exhibit was in one of the rear corners, where you could actually pick up a pickled human brian or half-brain. The lady in charge of this booth gave me a wonderful quick tour of gross brain anatomy, pointing out some of the important sulci and other features I'd only seen illustrated in my Gray's Anatomy before. There ain't nothin' like the Real Thing. She managed this while all the time diplomatically handling packs of children and their parents who bobbled the brain(s) or shrieked.

Jordan tells me the Emory neuroscience folks plan to do something like this again next year. I hope we can be part of it again.

-- CHS

-- CharlesShapiro - 15 Mar 2002