Brain Festival 2003

Another rousing Brain Festival happened yesterday. Thanks to Joyce and Andy Howard, Jay Jones, Johnathan Perry, Bruce Plott, Andy Ford, and Bob Mckee for juggling at SciTrek. The booths this year were outstanding, helped by enough grant money to make SciTrek admission free for a day and provide a generous supply of T-shirts, toys, rulers, and other amusing stuff.

Of particular merit were the wired grasshopper, the vision deficit glasses, and the brain chemistry table. The wired grasshopper was a grasshopper with electrodes attached to the large central nerve cord which runs along his body and an oscilloscope, then placed under a strong light. Move your hand so a shadow falls on his eyes, and what passed for his central nervous system went off like a firecracker. Move your hand in the darkness away from the light, or watch his own leg move, and no signal passed. It makes evolutionary sense when you consider that the main predators of grasshoppers are birds.

The vision deficit table featured several sets of cardboard glasses with various cutouts to simulate different types of vision problems associated with various kinds of neural damage. It was most interesting to find out that the central part of your vision is crucial in juggling, even when juggling 4 balls. Another booth featured glasses which shifted your vision field right by six inches or so. As you would expect, I missed consistently with the left hand while wearing these, although I experienced no countervailing problem with the right when I removed them.

The brain chemistry table featured various exhibits attempting to explain the way that nerve cells communicate through chemical dispersion at their ends. Pretty advanced stuff for an exhibition aimed at the peasants, but the demonstrations with funnels, bolts and beads were surprisingly lucid.

This year's festival is the last for Jordan Rose, but he promises a booth there next year on juggling + neuroscience. He also assured me that the next guy to do the exhibit will get our contact information.

At 8 pm Rodger, Toni, Jay, Johnathan, Bruce, Charles and Judy found ourselves seated around a table at Manual's Tavern entertaining famous juggler Mark Nizer (http://nizer.com), in town for some shows and holding a Saturday night stayover airline ticket. Nizer is a funny guy, and the talk ranged over the madness and misery of the juggling lifestyle, other great jugglers, "B" material, Mark's funeral, and the future of the famed Nizer Cup. A good time was had by all, and we even had enough money to pay the tab and tip the waitress.

-- CharlesShapiro - 10 Mar 2003