Greg Gage: The cockroach beatbox
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TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
how does the heart work,
oxygen for carbon dioxide.
it's hard to understand
at a brain and understand what it is.
not a pump, not an airbag.
in your hand when it was dead,
you have to go inside a living brain.
the brain is electrical and it's chemical.
100 billion cells, called neurons.
with each other with electricity.
in on a conversation between two cells,
to something called a spike.
or your brain or your teachers' brains,
friend the cockroach.
very similar to ours.
about how their brains work,
about how our brains work.
in some ice water here
Greg Gabe: Yeah ...
they become the temperature of the water
so they just basically "chillax," right?
about what we're going to do,
to understand the brain.
has all these beautiful hairs
that is going to send information
it's hard because they can feel you coming
they start running.
this information up to the brain
with electronic messages in there.
by sticking a pin right in there.
of a cockroach --
this electric message is going by.
let's see if you guys can see this.
that we came up with
equipment in a research lab,
in your own high schools,
and turn this on.
sound in the world.
is doing right now.
making these raindrop-type noises.
the axon looks like a spike.
looks like in just a brief second.
That's an action potential.
in your brain doing this right now,
about what you're seeing, hearing.
about vibrations in the wind.
and hear if we see a change.
if you hear anything.
with a little pen here.
in neuroscience to understand this.
the more spikes there are,
is coming up to your brain.
an experiment with electricity.
only taking in electrical impulses,
something that's electric
I'm going to plug them onto the cockroach.
I'm going to plug in into my iPod.
work in your ears?
in your phone, or iPod, right?
into these magnets in your earbuds
and allow you to hear things.
that our brain uses,
when we play music into the cockroach.
It's moving on the bass.
O bəm ilə hərəkət edir.
are the biggest speakers.
have the longest waves,
these things to move.
that are causing electricity.
another person out on the stage here
happened in the history of mankind.
think about neuroscience
the neuro-revolution.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Greg Gage - NeuroscientistTED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.
Why you should listen
As half of Backyard Brains, neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage builds the SpikerBox -- a small rig that helps kids understand the electrical impulses that control the nervous system. He's passionate about helping students understand (viscerally) how our brains and our neurons work, because, as he said onstage at TED2012, we still know very little about how the brain works -- and we need to start inspiring kids early to want to know more.
Before becoming a neuroscientist, Gage worked as an electrical engineer making touchscreens. As he told the Huffington Post: "Scientific equipment in general is pretty expensive, but it's silly because before [getting my PhD in neuroscience] I was an electrical engineer, and you could see that you could make it yourself. So we started as a way to have fun, to show off to our colleagues, but we were also going into classrooms around that time and we thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could bring these gadgets with us so the stuff we were doing in advanced Ph.D. programs in neuroscience, you could also do in fifth grade?" His latest pieces of gear: the Roboroach, a cockroach fitted with an electric backpack that makes it turn on command, and BYB SmartScope, a smartphone-powered microscope.
Greg Gage | Speaker | TED.com