Can we control the electrical activity in our brains?

Suitable for 14-19-year olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom, STEM clubs and at home.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 biology.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This teaching resource explains the work of Dr Adam Packer, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK. He is using calcium imaging and optogenetics to investigate neural activity in mice, shedding light on what happens when human brain malfunctions.

• This resource also contains interviews with Dr Huriye Atilgan and Sarah Armstrong, members of Adam’s lab, and offers an insight into careers in neuroscience. If your students have questions for Adam, Huriye and Sarah, they can send them to them online. All they need to do is to go to the article online (see the Futurum link below), scroll down to the end and type in the question(s). Adam, Huriye and Sarah will reply!

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Adam’s research and challenges them to design a new experiment for Adam to investigate how mice experience sensations.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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