Car coming. In a blink of an eye—about 1/10th of a second—a signal zips from your eye to the brain’s image-processing center and from there to your feet. You see the car; you jump out of the way.
It’s all about the brain, about three pounds of often miraculous functions that scientists are working around the clock to fathom.
That image of the oncoming car, for example, travels through the human optic nerve, a bundle of about 1.2 million fibers that, for most of us, provides the main sensory inputs for living. And all that input and output is processed by the brain’s 100 billion neurons, which are hooked up like a vast computer network in trillions of connections—0.15 quadrillion synapses, to be exact. In comparison, Intel’s next-generation microprocessor will contain 2 billion transistors.
“The brain is truly the most fascinating organ that we have,” said Sally Pyle, PhD, professor of biology and an anatomist, who now heads the University of North Dakota (UND) Honors Program. “It’s simply amazing!”
Pyle and colleague Karen Cisek, a biologist who works in program development for North Dakota INBRE at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences, run the regional Brain Awareness Week and the annual Brain Bee. Both are part of a loosely affiliated group of similarly named nationwide organizations and contests.
“We started Brain Awareness Week when my daughter was just starting grade school,” said Cisek, who coordinates Brain Bee activities in the region. “I was looking for ways to enrich her experience and make science more interesting.”
For Pyle, the impetus—after attending a Brain Awareness Week kick-off meeting at a national convention—was to make learning about science more interesting in her biology classes.
“I’d met Karen when I taught experimental pathology and toxicology of the nervous system in the biology department. I was looking to develop a very different kind of learning experience,” Pyle said. “So Karen and I blended our ideas, and we became partners in the Brain Awareness Week.”
The ultimate fascination with the brain is that it’s what makes us human.
“And while we study it all the time and understand more and more about it, that just leads to more questions,” Pyle said. But, she noted, there’s a lot more to Brain Awareness week than teaching kids about the human central nervous system.
Brain Awareness Week is a global campaign that unites those who share an interest in elevating public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain and nervous system research, according to the Society for Neuroscience, which kicked off this international movement. “Its primary concern is to inspire the next generation of scientists,” Cisek said. Not just neuroscientists—though that’s always a nice perk to the group of neuroscientists that cooked this up—but all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers, the so-called STEM professions.
