• Question: hello what is your main study of the brain and what type of interesting experiments do you carry out and how would this benifit us if we voted for you????????? :-)

    Asked by pigeonhunter5000 to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 8 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by brunodavies, ss123, toothy.
    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      Hi all!

      My main study of the brain involves languages and understanding first how the brain processes language that we read and speak, how this changes for someone who has more than one language (a bilingual), and finally what happens as we age or have accidents that means we lose the language abilities.

      My experiments:

      I try to understand how reading words is affected when it’s possible to read more than one word at once. For example, if I asked you if the word ‘proof’ was related to ‘house’ you’d probably say no, and you’d be right to! BUT if you look at the word ‘proof’ you’ll notice that inside it is the word ‘roof’ which definitely is related to the word ‘house’. It turns out that our brain is so clever that when we read we not only read the whole word, but all the words that might be buried inside it too!

      I’ve also done some interesting experiments measuring how peoples eyes get distracted by pictures with a similar meaning, for example showing them pictures of a tree, a dog, a cat and a house, and watching their eyes try to decide between the dog and cat. The brain is actually very good at reading words and naming pictures extremely quickly, but sometimes makes mistakes when two things are ‘related’ by meaning in our minds, we almost get a little confused by it!

      How it helps:

      This research is important for people with dyslexia who might well read several words in every word or confuse words, and trying to understand how this happens may help us develop ways of printing or reading words that can stop this happening. Dyslexia affects an awful lot of people and I hope it can help in some way. It’s also possible that this can help us understand where in the brain these words are thought of which can help us understand how brain damage affects reading, or whether brain surgery is going to stop someone from being able to read.

    • Photo: James Stovold

      James Stovold answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I study the theory of the brain — so looking at how we think and how the brain changes as we learn — and then using this to control robots that can think and can learn in the same way.

      My experiments will generally look at how well a group of robots can work out how to solve a problem (such as finding their way through a maze, or how they can get over a wall or across a gap). This involves lots of sitting watching robots running round crashing into things, and occasionally they get it right!

      My work would benefit quite a few people in the world, as I’m hoping to get the different groups of robots to recognise their own group, even when other robots are around. This would mean that multiple groups of robots could work in the same area, which would make robotic search-and-rescue a possibility, which means we wouldn’t need to send more people into collapsed buildings, for example.

    • Photo: Susanna Martin

      Susanna Martin answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Hey!
      Strictly speaking I don’t study the brain. I’m a psychologist who looks at how humans and computers interact, and in particular I look at how some hand held technology can help people to learn science by giving them the chance to collect data themselves and to understand all the context around their data. Some people in my lab are working on new technology tools and if won the money i’d use it to buy something called an Arduino http://www.arduino.cc/ which is like a small computer, then we’d take these into schools and run workshops with the students and teachers for creating their own tools.

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