When it comes to the nervous system, you might think we’ve got the basics down. After all, it’s been over a century since the great Santiago Ramón y Cajal proposed the neuron doctrine, which basically said that the nervous system is made up of individual, discrete cells called neurons. As you may recall from our […]

Help us win a Grant to Empower a New Generation of Sports Scientists! Through our adventures at Backyard Brains over the years, we have come to love electromyography, muscle coordination, and the body in movement. We have already begun some classes where we teach muscle physiology through sport! We recently applied for a grant to devote […]

Hey everyone! I’m Pablo, a junior from Nido de Aguilas High School in Santiago, Chile. In my free time, I like to doodle and run. My project is a multi-channel version of the experiment that my colleague and friend Cristian developed: it consists of using the SpikerShield Pro’s ability to get data from multiple channels […]

Hi everyone! I’m Cristian, a junior at Nido de Aguilas High School in Chile. Aside from math and engineering, which are my main interests, I enjoy playing drums and reading nonfiction. During my internship here at Backyard Brains, I’ve been working on building a musical instrument! It is a modification of our Muscle SpikerShield that […]

Backyard Brains is live from inside the classroom of Colegio Alberto Blest Gana in Santiago to present you 5 group projects brought to life by creative and passionate students. and the methodology we used to choose the projects. This high school has been like a second lab for Backyard Brains, where the students beta test […]

Hi! Juan Ferrada here from the University of Santiago again to give you an update on my project with Backyard Brains. Main Project – Single unit recording from Snail Neurons First mission – Isolate the Neurons As we spoke of a month ago, we are trying to record the individual neurons of the giant pacemaker […]

About me Hi! I am Juan Ferrada, a biochemistry student at the lovely Universidad de Santiago in Chile. That’s me below with my girlfriend Rocia on campus. She is an important part of my project. At the university I work with Dr. Patricio’s Rojas, a longtime colleague of Backyard Brains. Thanks to Patricio, Backyard Brains’ […]

On April 24, the co-founder of Backyard Brains, Greg Gage, returned to the TED stage to give another intriguing talk that included live scientific experiments: this time, he showed that plants, like animals, can use electrical signals to make rapid movements. If you missed it, you can see the TED talk here! Now, take a […]

Longtime Backyard Brains fans may recognize Pablo Guerra in the majority of our human interface videos. When not acting for Backyard Brains, Pablo Works as Electronic Music Artist, specifically, modifying electronic music instruments in a discipline called “Circuit Bending.” Circuit bending or also called “toy hacking” is the art of corrupting a musical toy from […]

Neuroscience is making its way across the globe! Recently, The Harvard South Asia Institute selected 25 young students of technology to participate in a two-week long workshop, introducing them to the excitement and interdisciplinary nature of neuroscience and engineering in Bangalore, India. Course managers included our longtime Harvard colleagues and scientists Venkatesh Murthy and Laura Magnotti , and during two weeks […]

Call for Undergraduates in Biology or Engineering Fields Do you have an interest in neuroscience? Do you like squids or dragonflies? Electrical, Mechanical or Computer engineering? Want to develop your own experiments and publish your results?  Learn to communicate with the public?  Maybe even all of the above?  Then you’re in luck! The Backyard Brains […]

Ramiz Kara is a freshmen at Emory University as a Pre-Med track, and he had some questions. He wanted to know the effects of meditation on brain waves and abstract problem solving, so he decided to make his own experiment to measure this, using our EEG device, the Heart and Brain SpikerShield. Although he didn’t find conclusive […]