Brain Day encourages students to make healthy decisions

Today is about teaching students about the brain and how substances affect the brain. Teens are smart, they want to be treated with autonomy, and this is a way to meet them where they're at and give them again the choice to make healthy decisions for themselves with all the information available to them. So we have three stations today, all centered on teaching these students about the brain, the research methods that get us to know about the brain and how substances affect the brain. The high school students that we have today, they're actually visiting from a school in Pulaski County, and several of them are actually interested in health professions and pharmacy. So this works out to be a perfect topic for them to engage with. The second room is where we have students demonstrating the MRI machine. In the context of drug addiction or substance use. You can actually have participants enter the machine and that allows you to actually scan the brain while the participants are performing certain tasks and get data in real time. We did the "Just Say Know" presentation, which is a different version of the traditional "Just say no to drugs" presentation. It takes a more scientific approach to telling children why you should not do drugs and how they're harmful to your brain and your body. The brain is the most important thing in our body and there's still so much that we don't understand about it. I think that demonstrations like this are absolutely vital for getting new people interested in this field and inspiring more people to take up an appreciation for it. So at my work station, I was specifically focusing on using certain animal models to study behaviors and effects of certain medications. I hoped by just doing something fun that maybe I could just get them excited about the brain. Get them excited about neuroscience. I hope they walk away from today with a scientific curiosity about the brain. If anyone in this group comes out of this program and says, I want to go to Virginia Tech and study neuroscience or psychology, that would be a huge win for our team and really important for us.