Summer Career Connections Session 4, Day 3, Neuroscience 101
Day 3: Happy Wednesday everyone!
I can’t believe we are halfway through the week already! This morning’s icebreaker was “What Crumbl cookie would you pick this week?”, so you can blame me if your students come home begging for cookies. We also looked through some more fun facts about the brain, including that we should take brain freeze seriously – it is a warning via the brain!
We dove into our “Neuroscience and the Arts” and “Law, Ethics, and Politics” career segments today. We discussed how the intersection of Neuroscience and the Arts is breaking old beliefs that “hard” and “soft” sciences are mutually-exclusive – rather, the arts really enhance neuroscience, and vice versa. We even tried engaging in a form of art called “Neurographic Art.” If you’re interested in learning more about it or engaging in more of it with your student, there are a lot of great tutorials on YouTube! It is used as a form of art therapy to stimulate positive neural connections in the brain. We really enjoyed both the hands-on nature of the activity and understanding the science behind it after our hard work the first 2 days.
After lunch, we headed to the computer lab for the first time this week. Here, we read some interesting articles on the intersection between Law and Neuro (“NeuroLaw”), including future directions in Detecting Lies, Detecting Bias, and Memory. With all of these career areas, I continue to emphasize to your students that these sorts of dynamic fields do exist! It is ok to be passionate about a few different areas, sometimes, they can combine to be extra impactful in our world.
For the large remainder of the day, we began working on our final projects. It was wonderful to see your students finding articles that “perfectly answered their curiosities,” and pouring creativity into the design and content of their projects. Tomorrow is our main project completion day, but your students were very eager to get the ball rolling today. We ended the day by discussing how to be an educated consumer of popular press media and role-played being a group of investors, consultants, and research scientists in making investment decisions around a specific direction in research.
I love continuing to get to know your students and seeing their intellect, hard work, and personalities shine!
Sincerely,
Nicolette