BRAIN EXPO 2010 STATION DESCRIPTIONS

Friday, April 30 -- Invitation Only

Club Neuron
Get on the guest list to explore inside our 6-foot soma and 35-foot axon and dance to neurotransmission. Learn about neuron anatomy, action potentials, and neurotransmission. Spill out into the synapse to send a message.

LIFE: Your Path to Neuroscience
Play the game of LIFE on your path to becoming a professional neuroscientist. Consider academic and career choices, finances, family, and lifestyle. Eventually, join a diagnostic team of investigators to identify the source of a patient's neurological deficits.

Are You...Too Drunk to Dunk
Alcohol disrupts normal functions such as vision, motor skills, and judgement. Using visual distortion goggles, simulate the sensory-motor deficits associated with alcohol intoxication, and consider the dangers of drunk driving.

Use It or Lose It!
Playgrounds enrich the lives and well-being of humans and other primates, such as gorillas and chimpanzees at Zoo Atlanta. Use games and foraging challenges to consider how environmental enrichment improves behavior and enhances brain complexity.

Dr. Sleep
'Powernaps' might restore depleated energy, but 'nanonaps' are probably too short. Especially if you're a napper, you'll want to learn about the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation. Also find out how your sleep habits compare to your neighbors, other primates, big cats, ungulates, and other creatures great and small.

The Phantom Menace
"Phantoms in the Brain"  by V. S. Ramachandran drives this station to explore the brain anatomy and plasticity surrounding phantom limb syndrome. Patients complaining of pain, itching, irritation, and other concerns arising from a missing body part sometimes find relief using Rama's invented "mirror box." Check it out for yourself.

Touch-A-Brain
With a real human brain to provide first-hand information about the shape and form of the human brain, visitors explore human brain anatomy and compare it with brain anatomy from other vertebrate brain models. Evolutionary considerations included.

Do You See What Your Eyes See?

Do you sometimes see colors that aren't really there? Does the moon look huge on the horizon, but small high in the sky? Check out human eye anatomy and visual system physiology to learn why you probably answered "yes" to those questions.