Exploring the Brain 🧠

Every Friday, during the Interactive Science Elective, the Otago University has been coming to Tahuna to help us explore brain science and unlock the mysteries of the mind!

This year I signed up to Interactive Science for my elective and it's been really fun! The first lesson we got to do was we put an EEG on which are these weird ears that move when they pick up your brain waves. There was another thing that picks up brain waves that controlled a mechanical spider from your brain waves but it didn't work. We learnt about neurons and the different parts and types of them. We then made neurons out of pipe cleaners. At the very end we shot nerf guns at targets but then they gave us these glasses that flipped your vision and it felt really weird! 

The next time we learnt about the brain and then made helmets for our “brains” (we used eggs for the brains). We got a bunch of materials to make the helmets out of and we had to make it light, not too big and it had to look cool. Then what we did was we went to test our helmets by dropping them off the deck. Most of our eggs broke but it was so fun and we got to learn about the different layers inside your head that protect your brain from getting damaged. 

Just last Friday we got to test our blood pressure when we were listening to music. We listened to slow, medium and fast music and the faster it got the faster the average bpm in the room got! So we learned that when you listen to music your body kind of syncs with it and your heartbeat will change slightly. We also learned about the different parts of the heart such as the left ventricle which transports the blood with oxygen around the body the right ventricle which transports blood with no oxygen to the lungs, the aorta which is an artery that carries blood and the pulmonary artery also carries blood. Then we went outside and did exercise to see how high our bpm would get and how high the oxygen levels got. Then at the very end we did a quiz on the heart and got fruit bursts! 

- Ed Young