Ph.D. student and friend of Backyard Brains, Brinnae Bent of Duke University, recently hosted a class for seniors participating in the “Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke (OLLI at Duke).” With help from some colleagues at North Carolina State University, she put on an afternoon workshop in Electrophysiology for these lifelong learners. From […]

Backyard Brains has just added another feature to our ever longer list of media appearances! This time, our co-founder and CEO, Dr. Greg Gage, talked for The Gastronauts, Duke University’s monthly seminar and podcast series. This seminar is being organized by researchers passionate about gut-brain matters. But when one invites the driving force behind […]

Every fencer will hear it countless times: warm-ups are a MUST. Do them and they’ll bump up your performance. Skip them and you may end up hurting yourself. But not every fencer will ask why! Supriya Nair, a busy sixth-grader from Redmond, WA, decided to conduct an experiment and find out what the correlation is between […]

Can we enhance our learning and improve memory recall during sleep? Apparently, sleep does have secret powers! It has been recently discovered that such magic can happen through targeted memory reactivation during sleep. Studies have shown that by associating a sound cue while learning to perform a specific task, you can then play […]

— Written by Milica Manojlovic — Aaaand the results are in! So, just a quick recap – we were hoping to get as much data on the way we process the Pinocchio illusion by measuring different behavioral outcomes as well as the EMG in three timepoints. As far as the behavioral measures are concerned, we questioned participants […]

These past few months we’ve been hard at work adding more experiments to our online library. We just released two new ones! New Experiment I: Why do your muscles get tired?, illustrated by Cristina Mezuk, our resident favorite artist in Ann Arbor New Experiment II: What is the effect of temperature on conduction velocity?, illustrated by a Chilean Comic Book […]

After spending 24+ hours in a hot closet with strangers, I’ve learned a couple things. Walk with me (like lovers do) So far, I have recorded from a lot of people with a large range of experience levels in search for a biomarker for meditation- e.g. something more reliable than a person just “saying so” when […]

Hello dear reader! It’s Maria again and my meditation project is picking up speed. I’ve now recorded ~brain waves~ from 20 different people! If I’ve learned anything so far, it’s that in science it’s data or bust. I’ve been soliciting people over email and clipboarding more than a Jehovah’s Witness. If this science thing doesn’t […]

Heyhey, My name is Etienne Serbe and I just recently finished my PhD at the MPI for Neurobiology in Germany. Two years ago I met Greg and Tim during the Summer School ‘Methods in Computational Neuroscience’ and it was love at first sight 🙂 We stayed in contact to figure out common future projects and […]

In an article we previously published in June 2022 about our scientific paper that dealt with play behavior in fish, I concluded at the end of the article: “I think it is possible for novices and high school students to publish papers (and it is the dream and goal of our team)… That is why we […]

Are you a member of an organization or institution committed to celebrating the wonders of the brain and bringing them from academic heights down to your local community? If yes, now is the time to apply for Brain Awareness Week (BAW) Outreach Grants for US and Canada! Grantees will be awarded up to $1,500 that they […]

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to the last installment of silkmoth updates. Things are starting to wrap up here this summer, and I’ve begun to analyze the data I have been collecting. Behavioral Data Analysis Last post, I explained the behavior assay that I am using with the moths to demonstrate how the sex pheromone bombykol can alter […]