At Oxford Science Adventures, we always try to think of new ways to convey tricky concepts about how our brains and minds work. At the last OSA in October 2015, we decided to try a group craft project to explore how information is passed around the brain when we look at objects in our environment. We first played an active game, in which some children were given “features” (“has legs”, “is small”, “brown”) and others “objects” (“teacup”, “dog”). The children holding features were told what the target object was, and would hold up their feature cards for the object group to see. The object group then had to figure out what the target object was. This quick game introduced the idea that features of objects like colour, shape, and movement are all extracted by parts of the brain, and that these features are then recombined in object recognition.
There is no “little man” in the brain that tells us what we’re looking at. How does this final stage – recognising an object – occur? One idea about how our brains recognise objects is grandmother cells. The grandmother cells theory is that every object has a cell in a part of the brain, and that when we recognise this object this special cell becomes active. Grandmother cells got their name because one neuroscientist made a joke about the idea, saying that if this theory were true then there must be a cell for his granny. Although he was joking, other scientists thought this was a great name, and it has stuck!
At each session, children worked together to build colourful networks, linking up parts of the brain that process colour, motion and shape, to the eventual grandmother cell areas. In some of the models, you can see that the children even got the streams of information from the two eyes to cross over on the way to the visual areas – the optic chiasm in the brain actually does this (information from our right eye goes to the left side of our brain, and vice versa).
Our brains do such a good job of seeing and processing the world, that we can take for granted how complicated this job really is. Sometimes you only realise the complex structure of the brain’s jobs when something goes wrong. While sticking together lots of paper chains, we got to discuss with the children what they thought the effects would be if a part of the brain was damaged – what would happen if our colour area was broken? Or our motion area? These are real neuropsychological cases that happened, and the difficulties patients with specific brain damage have can inform us about how our visual systems work.
We were very pleased with the beautiful networks created by the children, and we hope they had fun creating them!
There is no “little man” in the brain that tells us what we’re looking at. How does this final stage – recognising an object – occur? One idea about how our brains recognise objects is grandmother cells. The grandmother cells theory is that every object has a cell in a part of the brain, and that when we recognise this object this special cell becomes active. Grandmother cells got their name because one neuroscientist made a joke about the idea, saying that if this theory were true then there must be a cell for his granny. Although he was joking, other scientists thought this was a great name, and it has stuck!
At each session, children worked together to build colourful networks, linking up parts of the brain that process colour, motion and shape, to the eventual grandmother cell areas. In some of the models, you can see that the children even got the streams of information from the two eyes to cross over on the way to the visual areas – the optic chiasm in the brain actually does this (information from our right eye goes to the left side of our brain, and vice versa).
Our brains do such a good job of seeing and processing the world, that we can take for granted how complicated this job really is. Sometimes you only realise the complex structure of the brain’s jobs when something goes wrong. While sticking together lots of paper chains, we got to discuss with the children what they thought the effects would be if a part of the brain was damaged – what would happen if our colour area was broken? Or our motion area? These are real neuropsychological cases that happened, and the difficulties patients with specific brain damage have can inform us about how our visual systems work.
We were very pleased with the beautiful networks created by the children, and we hope they had fun creating them!