The Big Brain Experiment: 5 Mini-Missions into the Mind

Mission HQ

Step one in the Big Brain Experiment is to register your school on the main page.

Each mini-mission (experiment) has its own page (linked below) with videos and other resources for running the experiments with a class. Exactly what you do and when is up to you.

Mission Pages

On each mission page (linked below) you’ll find videos to show to students, a teacher tips video and a pdf with an experiment summary, list of anything needed and a results table to use.

Mission One – The Colour of Thoughts.
Reading a list of mismatched colours and words sounds simple enough but turns out to be quite challenging for most people. This fun and simple experiment tests the selective attention capacity and processing speed of the brain.

Mission Two – Memory and Mnemonics.
How good is your memory? This experiment not only tests memory and recall, but also provides ways to improve your memory and see how effective it is.

Mission Three – Pain and the Brain
How painful is holding your hand in a bucket of ice and water, on a scale of 1 – 10? This experiment tests the subjective nature of pain across individuals, and don’t worry, no harm is done.

Mission Four – The Speed of Thinking
How quick are your reactions? This experiment will test the reaction time of students and explain just how much is going on inside the body and brain in a few milliseconds.

Mission Five- Which Side are you on?
Right-handed? Left-footed? What about ears and eyes? This experiment tests the dominance of different parts of your body and lets you compare all that to the class or the rest of the world.