Jumping out of one’s comfort zone, scientifically, can be terrifying enlightening. As part of this week’s ongoing Cambridge Science Festival, investigators from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT gave a series of 30 minute talks (tangent: all talks should be 30 minutes, not too long, not too short, no one falls asleep) covering research areas from the macro scale of human cognition and child development to the microscopic details of cellular neuroscience.

Laura Schulz, a developmental psychologist at MIT, kicked of the seminar series by describing her work on early learning in child development. Psychologists (and, well, everyone else) have long accepted that children learn through play, and that they always show a preference for a new, unexplored toy over one that has been sitting before them. Using her on-site lab at the Children’s Museum – and the many children that pass through it every day – Schulz asked whether this preference for the new toy would hold if the “old” toy confused second graders, requiring further investigation. After a minute with a toy that made sense (pull a lever and a puppet pops up), the kids readily switched to a new toy placed before them. If, however, the toy presented them with “confounding evidence”, in which two levers brought up one of two toys, the kids, more often than not, chose to continue exploring the confusing toy. Schulz concluded that incomplete or confusing information makes kids explore more, often in preference of a new toy. Can her work shed light on why scientists persevere in characterizing the unknown? As one audience member pointed out, perhaps all scientists are kids at heart.

The vibrant Laura Schulz giving a talk on early learning.

The next talk, by Aude Oliva at the Computational Visual Cognition Lab at MIT, focused on the way grown-ups perceive visual cues. By asking the audience to participate in a series of perception tests, she demonstrated that our brain fills in the details your eyes fail to provide, a phenomenon termed ‘unconscious vision’. She went on to describe how the brain perceives hybrid images, in which two merged images appear different based on the viewing distance. A series of these hybrid images were recently featured in an exhibit at the MIT Museum.

Slide on hybrid images during Oliva’s talk.

The evening continued with wrapped up with a talk by Yingxi Lin on a neuronal master switch, Npas4, a transcription factor which controls the formation of inhibitory synapses in the central nervous system. Deletion of Npas4 leads to neuronal overstimulation, in which excitatory synapses make neurons fire continually; mice which cannot express Npas4 suffer from continual seizures due to neuronal overactivity. The Npas4 knock out mouse can therefore be used as a model system for the study of seizure disorders in humans.

Ki Ann Goosens finished the evening with an overview of the stress system and how the human body and brain process stressful stimuli.

I fully expected the audience, composed of mostly lay people, to lose interest in the cellular talk. I always thought that the minutiae of science are difficult to explain or relate to the human experience (more difficult than videos of kids playing with toys, in any case). I was wrong. The cellular talk attracted as many questions as the other, broader lectures and placed in context recent Nobel Prizes, as the work described used both GFP and RNA interference. I suppose that was the whole purpose of the event – and of the Cambridge Science Festival as a whole – to showcase all versions of science, from the macro down to the micro, to draw interest and to relate findings to everyday life.