Backyard Brains

By Greg Gage Adjunct Assistant Professor, Molecular & Integrative Physiology

Iam a neuroscientist that has recently joined the Molecular & Integrative Physiology department as an adjunct assistant professor. My work builds upon a background in neuroethology, engineering, and education in a rather unconventional way.

Neuroscience is often perceived to be too complex or too expansive to be taught in K12 schools. It is not surprising that neuroscience is typically taught only at the university level, and experiments using living brains are typically only found at well-funded research institutions.

Perhaps a better reason why neuroscience doesn’t find its way into more classrooms may not be because the brain is too complex, but rather the research tools are too expensive. There are a limited number of active neuroscience researchers when compared to typical consumers, so the market that has developed to support them with equipment must charge a premium to stay in business. This is not a problem for wellestablished neuroscientists as they budget for this in their grants, but it makes neuroscience tools out of reach for most high schools and elementary schools.

As a graduate student in the University of Michigan’s psychology department, my labmate (Tim Marzullo) and I spent our summer scheming of a way to change this. We created a self-imposed challenge to develop a tool that could record living neurons for less than $100. We presented our working prototypes at a major neuroscience conference, and much to our surprise it was picked up by the journal Nature and soon we were receiving emails from around the world. Other scientists wanted to purchase the invention to demonstrate live neuroscience recordings to their students (and use in their labs too!) We decided to form a small company “Backyard Brains,” named in honor of the bugs we used to record living neurons (cockroaches, worms, etc.)

It’s been over a decade since the initial invention, and Backyard Brains has been growing ever since! We have developed products for K12 that allow young scientists to perform electrophysiology on neurons (spikes), muscles (EMG), the heart (EKG) and the brain (EEG). We create kits using Arduinos that allow students to build brain-machine interfaces and neuroprosthetics. We allow students to learn about microstimulation by building their own cyborg cockroach: the RoboRoach (It’s still the only commerciallyavailable cyborg to date). Even advanced research topics like optogenetic manipulation of neurons or machine learning of behaviors can be done in the classroom.

I’ve turned an alternative post-doc into an alternative academic career. Our work is now supported by a mix of academic grants and product sales. Our research lab consists of undergraduate students and teachers, and our work is published as new lesson plans and peer-reviewed research papers. So don’t be surprised to overhear 10-year olds debating Rate-Based vs. Spike-Based theories of the brain!