I’m always looking for new opportunities to take the lab out into the ‘real world’. Here are a few of the engagement activities that we have delivered in Glasgow over the last couple of years.
Glasgow’s Looking Everywhere! (2023)
We had a lot of fun at Glasgow Science Festival & Explorathon this year. We were using prism goggles to show people how fast their brain can change and adapt to new experiences. This stall was all about brain plasticity.
These goggles shift your vision to the left, right or downwards. People tried to throw beanbags into a bucket when they had the glasses on. This was difficult at first, but they adapted and soon managed to hit the bucket. Then, when they took the glasses off, they threw again and most people aimed too far in the opposite direction. A really fun way to demonstrate plasticity in action!
Rhythms of the Brain (2019 & 2022)
Perhaps our most ambitious engagement project to date! We took our EEG systems out into museums as part of Explorathon (2019) and Glasgow Science Festival (2022). People had the opportunity to see their own brain activity on our laptops in real-time. They could see changes in their activity when they closed their eyes, blinked and clenched their jaw.
As part of this, we also recorded 30 seconds of brain activity from the back of the head (the occipital cortex) and managed to do this in 346 people aged 6-76 in just 29 hours of testing! We found some really interesting parallels with data that had previously been collected in controlled, lab-based settings. Our paper has recently been accepted for publication in Imaging Neuroscience, but you can read the pre-print here in the meantime. We also give tips for researchers who want to record EEG data in community settings in the future.
Dr Gemma Learmonth 