Visions-STEAM Anella outreach and BCB

The 5th of April we participated in the Visions-STEAM ANELLA 2019. It was a cold, cloudy and rainy day but it could not defeat the Outreach team composed by Tiffany, Albert, Genís, Jaime, Lluis, Balma, Ana and me. The event was in the emblematic “Estadi Olimpic” of Barcelona and welcomed more than 2000 students from ESO. The young minds of the future could learn about maths, technology, art and many other topics in a ludic environment.

To reach as many students as possible, we prepared several activities to approach neuroscience from different perspectives. Tiffany and Ana talked about brain-machine interface and prepared some devices that the students could try by themselves. The students were amazed when they could control their classmate’s hands with their own brain! I merged the worlds of neuroscience and magic, trying to convince the students that a magician is a hacker of the brain. As I am also a professional magician, I incorporated many magic tricks that drove them nuts. Finally, Albert, Genís, Jaime, Lluís and Balma prepared an activity where the students became neurons that coded for different information. In this funny game, some young neuroscientists had to discover what the neurons where watching based on the jumps of their classmates, recreating in an interactive and funny way how neuroscientists decode the neural activity.

It was an exhausting and terrific day that ended with this picture followed by a delicious meal. We were really satisfied with the feedback of the student, they were still too young to get a Post Doc position, but hopefully some will knock on the door in the coming years…

David.