Lesson Plans

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Visual Illusions

Watch a number of visual illusions

Focuses on limitations of the visual system and how the brain “sees” things that aren’t there.

Discuss: sensation versus perception, receptor adaptation and fatigue, aspects of visual processing...

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Mirror Drawing

Try to trace images while looking into a mirror

Focuses on sensory integration and adaptation to visual changes.

Discuss: how one sense - vision - guides another - touch and motor control, and how this can be changed over time...

Prism Goggles

Try to handle objects while wearing light-bending goggles

Focuses on sensory integration and adaptation to visual changes.

Discuss: how vision guides spatial awareness, and how this can be changed over time...

Face Paint & Brain Crafts

Make models of neurons and brains & wear neuro-face paint

Focuses on hands-on involvement and science as fun and stimulating.

Discuss: what are you making, what does it do in real life, what’s your favorite thing about the brain...

Insect Senses

Learn how other organisms have the same senses as us, but use them differently

Focuses on how our senses have evolved to help us navigate our environment.

Discuss: how you use your senses; how other animals use their senses; the scientific method...

Primacy and Recency

Experience a preference to remember first (primacy) and last items (recency) of a list

Focuses on how our brain organizes information and compensates when it can’t do everything.

Discuss: why we might remember things this way; limits of human memory...

Neurotoxins

Learn how “poisonous animals” use neurotoxins

Focuses on the brain as a complex physical object and how it can be “broken” or manipulated.

Discuss: cells, the physical basis of disease and medicine, even the nature of free will on a constrained system...

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Temperature Experiment

Experience a touch-illusion when one hand is adapted to cold water and the other is adapted to hot water.

Focuses on sensory adaptation.

Discuss: what you sense depends on what you sensed before; what else adapts; why might senses adapt...

McGurk Effect

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