trevordayschool

A What happens when a group of brains synchronize with one another? A When students are learning in a classroom, do their brains synchronize more with the teacher or more with their peers? A a nd what are the consequences of this synchrony in terms of learning and memory? oversee the whole project. e final piece of the puzzle was finding a group of highly motivated students with a strong interest in scientific research. e team decided that the senior advanced Biology class would be the right venue, and not surprisingly, the students in the class were excited at the prospect. eir initial interest only grew when they learned that they would be involved at all levels of the experiment, from helping to design the experimental conditions to recording and analyzing the data. In short, they would be working as actual scientists before graduating from high school! In fact, student enthusiasm was so great that they decided to start a Neuroscience Club. anks to club leaders Sophie D. '15 and adam K. '15, students throughout the high School now have the opportunity to design and execute their own neuroscience studies. rough the wizardry of NyU graduate student Michael rabadi, the club will soon be performing an experiment to listen to live neurons firing in real time. What makes our study so novel? e answer lies in the social nature of the experiment. a traditional electrophysiology experiment might try to link a particular stimulus to a response in the brain. For example, a subject might be shown a picture of a person in distress, and the researchers would monitor his or her brain activity to learn something about the neural basis of empathy. our study, however, attempts to bring this research to the next level: What happens when a group of brains synchronize with one another? For example, when students are learning in a classroom, do their brains synchronize more with the teacher or more with their peers? and what are the consequences of this synchrony in terms of learning and memory? For the first time, these questions are open to scientific investigation, and Trevor has the good fortune to be right in the thick of it. We hit the ground running in September 2014 with a crash course in the fundamentals of neuroscience. NYU postdoctoral fellow Soha Ashrafi expertly guided the students through the modern era of experimental neuroscience. Students were stunned by a presentation showing how scientists can induce extreme aggression in genetically altered mice with a simple burst of light. lisa Kaggen then covered the emerging field of social neuroscience, and the remarkable Suzanne Dikker introduced the students to the experiment itself. Dr. Poeppel also visited the class to challenge the students to think about a question of fundamental importance in this technological age: What is a signal, exactly? He took the class through the properties that define any signal and described how techniques used to analyze brain signals can help us understand how all sorts of technologies work. Working in collaboration with the scientific team, the students astutely pointed out that variables such as time of day and stress levels could have

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