— Written by Sachin Pillai — Hello to everyone out there! This is Sachin here again with updates on your very own portable poker bluff detector. I ended my last blog post mentioning how I developed the capability to collect electrodermal activity during full rounds of poker. This has allowed me to amass a large […]

While we have enjoyed learning about insect neuroscience during the past few years of our adventure, many teachers have asked us: “Do we have to use bugs?” or “Will this work on humans?” Recording from individual neurons or bundles of nerves requires invasive electrodes, so we are limited to insect preparations for neural activity. […]

Hello everyone! The previous two weeks have been an emotional and professional roller-coaster for me. It was tough saying goodbye to Etienne, who was such a lovely mentor for almost five weeks, but there was also the joy of welcoming Stanislav (our new mentor!), my parents from India visited me and then they left, I […]

Hi! I’m Shreya and I just graduated from the Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering affiliated to the University of Mumbai in Electronics Engineering. During the last two years of my undergraduate study, I spent most of my vacations, free time and some weekends working as a research intern at the Indian Institute of […]

My name is Nick Weston and I am an intern in the summer program at Backyard Brains.  I’m an an undergraduate student studying neuroscience at Michigan State University and during this internship I plan on trying to capture neuronal spiking activity from the internal organs of a crickets ear while also trying to record […]

Hi Everyone. Juan here! My two month tour with Backyard Brains has reached its end, and I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity to work on this project. I had three activites during the “practica” here at Backyard Brains: Recording from the Ganglia of Snails Helping on the Anemone Project Assisting in Outreach. The snail recording was […]

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 […]

One of the first ways neuroscientists were able to measure the “speed” of neural computation was via reaction time. A typical human reaction time, in which you push a button after seeing a light, is ~150-200 ms. With our new EMG SpikerBox, students can now measure the electrical activity of their muscles during movements. […]

During Backyard Brains’ recent visit to California, one of our events was at the Computer History Museum. We are geeks at heart: Our heroes consist of the trilogy of Woz, Engelbart, and Roberts. Tim and Greg have gazed longingly at the core memory units, the signed Apple I, the memory drums, and all the […]

After ten years pushing the borders of the NeuroRevolution, and five running Backyard Brains Summer Internships, we are sending our bravest Summer Fellowship Seniors to a continent far, far away! In this unknown (to them) land, adventures and challenges are waiting that will demand courage, stamina, and tenacity. We’ve set up our first camp in […]

Be it fate, choice, or a downstream effect of our universe’s tendency to gradually decay into chaos, I ended up doing what I love this summer, and surrounded by some of the most interesting people I’ve met. One could not ask for more. But this begs the question, “Would I have made it into such […]

This past summer, one of our interns worked on (and continues to work on!) a neuroscience project which many sleep-deprived students have literally dreamt of: Learning in your sleep! Joud’s project caught the eye of a few student documentarians from Princeton and they flew out to Ann Arbor to interview her. Joud’s and the documentarian’s focus […]