Grade Levels: 9-12

Time Allotment: Two 45-minute class periods

Overview: In this lesson, students view and discuss video segments from the PBS program The Human Spark, as they learn about the human brain, including information about brain regions, brain activity and technologies used to explore the brain. In the Introductory Activity, students compare the brains of chimps, rats, monkeys and humans and discuss why the brains of some species are larger than others.  In Learning Activity 1, students explore which regions of the brain are activated during different types of tasks and in Learning Activity 2, students learn about different technologies which provide insight into brain activity. In the Culminating Activity, students explore different regions of the brain.

Subject Matter: Science; Psychology

Learning Objectives:

Students will be able to:

• Identify the brains of chimps, rats, monkeys and humans.
• Discuss why the brains of some species are larger than others.
• Describe which different regions of the brain are activated by language activities, tool use and thoughts about other people’s thoughts.
• Discuss different technologies used to gather information about brain activity.
• Label and describe the different regions of the brain.

Standards:

National Standards for High School Psychology Curricula

Standard Area IIA: Biological Bases of Behavior
Content Standards
After concluding this unit, students understand:

• CONTENT STANDARD IIA-3: Hierarchical organization of the structure and function of the brain
  Students are able to (performance standards):
  • o IIA-3.1 Identify the structure and function of the major regions of the brain. Students may indicate this by (performance indicators): Identifying the regions of the brain by using diagrams and/or computer-generated diagrams; Summarizing the functions of the major brain regions.
  • IIA-3.2 Recognize that specific functions are centered in specific lobes of the cerebral cortex. Students may indicate this by (performance indicators): Describing the functions controlled by the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex; Relating examples of research on cortical functioning.
  • IIA-3.3 Describe lateralization of brain functions. Students may indicate this by (performance indicators): a. Identifying the role of the corpus callosum in hemispheric communication.
    
• CONTENT STANDARD IIA-4: Technologies and clinical methods for studying the brain
  Students are able to (performance standards):
  • IIA-4.1 Explain how research and technology have provided methods to analyze brain behavior and disease. Students may indicate this by (performance indicators): b. Discussing how the use of the CT scan, PET scan, MRI, fMRI, and EEG provides information about the brain.

Media Resources

The Human Spark, selected segments

• A Matter of Size
  A look at the brains of a rat, monkey, chimp and human and why some brains are bigger than others.

• Scanning the Brain
  An introduction to MRI scans.

• The Brain in Action
  A look at the regions of the brain which are activated during different tasks.

Websites:

The Secret Life of the Brain

This website for the PBS series “The Secret Life of the Brain” features information, interactives and video clips about the brain. This site includes information about the regions of the brain and brain scanning technologies, which can be used in Learning Activities 1 and 2.

Neuroscience for Kids

This website contains a variety of information and activities about the brain, spinal cord, neurons and the senses. It includes a section on “Brain Imaging,” which can be used as a resource in Learning Activity 2 (http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/image.html).

Materials

For the class:

• Computers with internet access
• Computer, projection screen and speakers (for class viewing of online/downloaded video segments)
• Scanning the Brain Answer Key (PDF) (RTF)

For each student:

• Scanning the Brain Student Organizer (PDF) (RTF)
• Four Brains Handout (PDF)

Before the Lesson

Prior to teaching this lesson, you will need to:

Preview all of the video segments and websites used in the lesson.

Print one copy of the “ Scanning the Brain Answer Key.

Print one copy of the Scanning the Brain Student Organizer and one copy of the Four Brains Handout for each student.

Download the video clips used in the lesson to your classroom computer(s) or prepare to watch them using your classroom’s Internet connection.

Bookmark all websites which you plan to use in the lesson on each computer in your classroom. Using a social bookmarking tool such as delicious or diigo (or an online bookmarking utility such as portaportal) will allow you to save the links in one location.

1. Let students know today’s lesson is about the brain. Ask students to brainstorm some facts they know about the human brain. Write down their answers and discuss. Keep them available for review and discussion later in the lesson.  
2. Ask students to discuss how they think the size and shape of the human brain compares with those of a rat, a chimp and a monkey.
3. Distribute the “Four Brains” handout and ask students to identify the four species whose brains are shown.
4. Let students know they will now be watching a video segment from the PBS program, The Human Spark, which features the brains of the four species featured on the Four Brains Handout. Ask students to observe which four species are featured and to try to determine which brain on their handout corresponds to which species.
5. Play A Matter of Size. After playing the segment, ask the students to review their photos and discuss which species were featured in the segment (chimp, rat, human and monkey). Ask students to discuss which brain they now think corresponds to which species. (1-chimp; 2-rat; 3-human; 4-monkey)
6. Ask students to compare and contrast the brains of the monkey, chimp and human. What do they have in common? (Their shapes.) What differs between them? (Their sizes. A human brain is three to four times bigger than a chimp brain.)
7. Ask students how the brains of primates compare to the brains of other species. (They are larger.)
8. Ask students to discuss what Robin Dunbar from Oxford University states as the reason why the brains of primates are larger than those of other species. (Their brains are bigger because of the more complex societies in which they live. The larger brains help them collaborate with others in order to solve problems of everyday life and death. Dunbar states that in order to live in a big group, one needs a big enough brain with sufficient computing power to handle all of the relationships.)

Learning Activity 1

1. Let students know they are now going to view a video segment which explores different parts of the brain and examines which sections are activated during a variety of tasks.  Ask students to record the tasks featured in the video, as well as which sections of the brain are highlighted during each task.
2. Play The Brain in Action. After playing the segment, ask the students to discuss each of the featured tasks and which parts of the brain were highlighted during each one.  

• Task: Language errors.
  • Words that don’t make sense-
    

  Region of the brain: area in back of brain, mostly on left sid

• Grammatical errors-

Region of the brain: toward front of brain, exclusively on left side (in adult). In child, the region is on left side of brain, but the area is less focused than in adult.

• Task: Tool Use

Region of brain: Left side of brain, very close to regions used for language.

• Task: Thinking about someone else’s thoughts.

Region of brain: Right Temporo-Parietal Junction (RTPJ), located on the right side of the brain, above the right ear.

3. Ask students to discuss why they think the brain regions activated for language and tool use are similar. (Both tasks involve action planning and   sequencing. Both involve the ability to modify a behavior in order to achieve a desired goal.)

4. Ask students to discuss what type of tasks stimulate the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction (RTPJ). (Thinking about other people’s thoughts). Explain this region is among a small number of cortical regions that are the most different in human brains compared to other brains. This is one of a few cortical regions that takes a long time to reach maturity in the life of a human child.

Learning Activity 2

1. Ask students to brainstorm the names of some of the machines or techniques that researchers use to find out about the activity taking place inside someone’s brain. (Possible answers: MRI scans, CAT scans, etc.)
2. Let students know they will now be viewing a video to learn about MRI scans. Ask students to observe what an MRI machine does and what type of information it can provide.
3. Play Scanning the Brain. After showing the video, ask students to discuss what MRI machines do and what type of information they provide. (MRI machines use a powerful magnetic field to image the brain and they can find out what parts of a person’s brain are active when the person is performing different tasks. The MRI takes images of slices of the brain from side to side, top to bottom and front to back. The slices are combined to give a complete 3-D image of the person’s head.)
4. Explain that the class will now be learning more about the different technologies researchers use to explore the brain. Distribute the Scanning the Brain Student Organizer and ask students to explore one of the following types of technologies in more detail:

• CAT/CT
• EEG
• MEG
• MRI and fMRI
• PET

5. Ask students to find out the following information for their assigned technology and to record their findings on the Scanning the Brain  Student Organizer:

• how it works
• the type of information it provides
• its advantages and drawbacks

Encourage students to use a variety of resources to find out the information. Here are two sites with information about brain scanning technologies:

• Secret Life of the Brain: Scanning the Brain http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/scanning/index.html
• Neuroscience For Kids: Brain Imaging http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/image.html

6. After the students have recorded their findings, ask them to share their information with the rest of the class.  As students share their information, have the rest of the class fill in the information about the technologies that they did not research. Refer to the Scanning the Brain Answer Key, as needed.

7. Lead a discussion about the different brain scanning technologies and ask students to compare and contrast the different approaches. Refer to the answer key, as needed.

Culminating Activity

1. Ask students to select one of the following brain regions to research:

● Brain Stem                     ● Limbic System and Thalamus

● Cerebellum                    ● Occipital Lobe

● Corpus Callosum           ● Parietal Lobe

● Frontal Lobe                  ● Temporal Lobe

2. Encourage students to use the “3-D Brain Anatomy” section of The Secret Life of the Brain website and other resources to explore their assigned region.

3. Ask students to find out the following about their assigned brain regions:

• the location of the region
• the main functions associated with the region
• other facts about the region

4. After students have completed their research, ask them to give a presentation to their classmates about their assigned region.

The Human Spark: Brain Matters, selected segments

A Matter of Size

A look at the brains of a rat, monkey, chimp and human and a discussion of why some brains are bigger than others.

Scanning the Brain

An introduction to MRI scans.

The Brain in Action

A look at the regions of the brain that are activated during different tasks.

Downloadable QuickTime versions of the video segments:
(Note: To download a video, right click on the video title and click “Save Link As…’ or “Save Target As…”. On a Mac, press the CTRL key and simultaneously click the mouse, then save the link.)

A Matter of Size

Scanning the Brain

The Brain in Action

The crew films Randy Buckner and Rebecca Saxe in the control room while Alan lies in the MRI machine, having his brain imaged. Photo: Maggie Villiger

By Graham Chedd

Now, I don’t want to get too excited, and I don’t want to give too much away – after all, we want you to watch our shows when they are broadcast. But I think we’ve just seen the first signs of the Human Spark – right inside Alan’s head.

Alan takes a look at the fresh pictures of his own brain. Photo: Larry Engel

We spent the day at MIT’s McGovern Institute, where Alan’s brain was being scanned while doing tasks set for him by MIT’s Rebecca Saxe and Harvard’s Randy Buckner.  Our filming Alan while he’s having his head examined is nothing new, by the way; in the days of Scientific American Frontiers we must have had him in and out of some half dozen MRI machines over the years. In fact, Randy remembered one of those shows, where another Harvard researcher had told Alan that he had a “plump hippocampus,” the brain region involved in helping lay down memories. Randy confirmed Alan’s hippocampus is still plump; in fact, Randy told Alan that he wouldn’t have guessed his age from looking at his brain.

There’s a story behind why we filmed with both Randy and Rebecca, who – while both rising stars in the neuroscience field – are actually working on two apparently unrelated special skills we humans possess. Rebecca has made her name by studying the brain regions involved in thinking about other people, especially thinking about what they are thinking about. Randy, meanwhile, has been studying how we think about the past, and more recently, how we think about the future.

As Rebecca told Alan: “I saw Randy giving a talk about thinking about the past and I looked at these pictures [of the brain] and I thought, ‘that looks really familiar.’ And so I went back to Randy afterward and I said, ‘I’ve got pictures that look a lot like those pictures.’ And so since then we’ve been working together to try to ask: what’s in common? What’s the same about thinking about your own past, your own future, and also other people?”

Well, you’ll have to wait for the answer until The Human Spark is on the air. But I can tell you that Alan had to perform two very different tasks in the scanner. One for Rebecca involved figuring out what a character in a video cartoon was thinking. (Rebecca tested children on the same kinds of social cognition tasks Alan tried. Read about her latest study on how these skills develop as kids mature.) The other for Randy, a word task, actually had nothing to do with what Randy was really looking for – which was what Alan’s brain was doing while he was simply waiting in the scanner, staring at a cross hair and letting his mind wander. What our brains do when we’re doing nothing very much is one of the hottest topics in neuroscience just now. As Randy puts it succinctly: “We think we’re seeing the idle brain not being so idle.”

Rebecca prepares to slide Graham into the MRI for his first ever brain scan. Photo: Larry Engel

I’m going to leave it to you to work out why Alan and the crew found these ideas so exciting, with the not very subtle hint that figuring out what others are thinking on the one hand, and being able to mentally time travel on the other, are two skills which, if not uniquely human, are in humans uniquely powerful. And the discovery that they appear to involve related brain areas – well, Sparks are flying.

As a postscript to the day, Rebecca offered me a chance to have my brain scanned in the McGovern Institute’s very fancy new MRI machine, which looks, by the way, a little like a set for “House.” Now this is something I’ve been given the chance to do many times over the years, going back to not long after MRI machines were invented. I’ve always said no, reasoning that my brain might turn out to be a little less than the perfectly honed machine I’ve always assumed it to be. But this time, inspired by Alan’s pristine hippocampus, I allowed myself to be slid into the tube and tried to think of nothing. You can see the results below.

I have a sneaky feeling Randy thought Alan’s brain looked better.

Scott Watrous is the MRI Technologist in the lab at the University of Oregon where we filmed Alan getting a brain scan. One of Scott’s most important responsibilities is making sure that nothing that can react with a magnet gets anywhere near the MRI machine. Watch this interview to learn more… and then check out the YouTube clips below that demonstrate WHY the “no metal” rule is so key!

Check out these YouTube videos:

• Oxygen bottle in an MRI magnet
• Oxygen Cylinder in MR Scan Room
• Missile Effect
• Chair gets stuck in an MRI machine

Filming conversation between Alan and neuroscientist Scott Frey. Note the grabbing tool on the table… can Alan successfully grasp the paper cup with it? Photo © Maggie Villiger 2008

The first few days of shooting with Alan have nicely confirmed one of the key inspirations for the series: that many very different sciences — and scientists — are out there looking for the Spark — even if they don’t know it. A couple of days ago we were in Oregon, peering with both an MRI and a brain wave monitor into Alan’s brain to find out how he employs it for two of the most distinctively human traits, language and tool use.

Alan models the EEG cap that will measure Event Related Potentials through his skull as he listens to spoken language. Photo © Larry Engel 2008

It turns out that the places in his brain involved in both talking and planning how to use a tool are physically quite close together. Is there an evolutionary connection? We’ll see…

These days with Alan have also confirmed how key he is to the project.

He patiently endured perhaps an hour in the claustrophobic and noisy MRI scanner imagining how he would use a tool, and another hour in what looks like a swimmer’s rubber hat studded with electrodes watching animated penguins talking gibberish (but grammatically correct gibberish).

Then he conducted lively and probing conversations with the scientists doing the studies — and also made them laugh, something you don’t see too much of in the average science documentary.

– Graham Chedd

When new discoveries are made in the field of neuroscience, you often hear that particular areas of the brain are active at particular times, or that other areas don’t have anything to do with specific skills. Once you dig deeper than the headline, you might start to wonder how scientists actually KNOW what’s happening in “the brain.” There’s not just one master brain out there for them to crack!

Neuroscientists rely on volunteers who are willing to have their brains analyzed while they perform particular tasks. With luck, over time the scientists are able to look at data from enough individuals to get a sense of what is happening in an “average” brain during their task of interest.

Brian Moore is one of the people who has volunteered a couple of times for Helen Neville’s language fMRI studies at the University of Oregon. Find out why in this video clip. Brian is deaf, so he signs his remarks. The voice you’ll hear is that of his interpreter, whose hands you might see a bit at the right of the frame.

Most research programs are always on the lookout for volunteers… if this possibility intrigues you, check out what’s happening at your local colleges and universities!

Volunteer Brian Moore receives instructions via a sign language interpreter before sliding into the scanner.

Today we’re in Eugene, Oregon. We started in the morning with what turned into a rather chaotic fMRI scene — six people in two locations. We were working with a deaf volunteer for a fascinating investigation into language and how the human brain understands grammar. The researchers are trying to figure out how we talk to one another — all over the world and in so many languages.

Warning sign outside the scanner room

What parts of our brain process language and its syntax? And what connections are there to other activities we humans pursue? What makes our species so good at gab?

Our volunteer went into the MRI and had to communicate with his sign language interpreter through a combination of mirrors and small video cameras. Because I had turned off all the overhead lights to create a more dramatic look for the scene, the volunteer had trouble seeing the interpreter in the control room via the mirrors and video screens.

The problem turned out to be that we had inadvertently turned on the neutral density filter on the camera so the monitor was dark not because of the lighting but because of human error…

We also can’t go very far into the MRI room with the camera or any ferrous (iron) metal. Because the MRI is a huge magnet, it sucks metallic objects from your hands into the donut of the MRI. If there is a person in there, there could be serious injury or death. Not to mention it would be the end of a very expensive piece of research equipment!

Larry Engel and John Garrett record picture and sound from just inside the doorway, while Graham Chedd keeps an eye on the monitor.

So we all tread carefully when entering the room. I can set a light at the perimeter and stand only a foot or so inside. We marked my forward limit with gaffers tape.

But because I enter a strong magnetic field even at the doorway of the MRI room, I still have to worry about the tape itself since it’s magnetic. So we always start with a fresh tape to make sure we don’t lose anything we shot before if the magnetic field erases the tape.

Also, the camera’s viewfinder gets instantly distorted — squeezed — by the magnetic field, making framing hard. Another step into the room and the image goes fuzzy — making it really hard to focus as well. Fortunately, these problems are only in the viewfinder, not on the tape. But I did have to rely on Graham just outside the door looking at the field monitor for focus and framing adjustments.

Nonetheless it was a good shoot and we got Alan into the MRI as well — got to see his brain at work from the inside!

More later, and thanks for reading.

Larry Engel
Director and Director of Photography