Empowering Minds With Neuroscience

The brain is our soul… our consciousness… it contains all of our hopes, dreams, and desires. It is our most important organ, yet how it works is still a mystery for most people–even though they use it every day! Sure, your brain helps you decide what pants to wear or which muscle to move when walking down a street, but how does it do that? Neuroscientists actually know quite a bit about how the brain functions, but the tools to understand the brain have been relegated to only large university laboratories, inaccessible to the layperson. Backyard Brains is the effort to democratize neuroscience.

As neuroscience Ph.D. students at the University of Michigan, co-founders Tim and Greg experimented with discussing neuroscience with middle school children. They quickly realized that there was no way to demonstrate compelling experiments like the ones from their research lab to the kids they were working with. The equipment was too big and too expensive. So they endeavored to fix that. Founding Backyard Brains (BYB) in 2009, Tim and Greg used off-the-shelf electronics and readily-available products to create kits that would let kids learn about neuroscience at an earlier age. The first Spikerbox was born, a hand-held device able to provide insight into the inner workings of the nervous system and record living “spikes” … the messages of neurons in the brain.