Balancing Minds - boardgame

Student - Sabrina-Paula Eckerstorfer

Supervisor - Professor Juan Burrone

My project is a board game that was developed to facilitate non-neuroscientists’(14+) understanding of how homeostatic forms of plasticity maintain stable neuronal activity in our brains. This directly reflects my supervisor’s research, which investigates the mechanisms by which neurons regulate the balance between excitatory and inhibitory inputs to avoid detrimental hyper- or hypo-activity. First, I included a boardgame leaflet, which presents homeostatic plasticity inlay and graphic terms, and a summary of the boardgame’s rules. Players each start off on their own dendrite and accumulate or lose inhibitory and excitatory weights at each synapse on their way to the soma. Once they have reached the axon initial segment, the players can weigh their beads to evaluate who disposes of the best balance between excitatory and inhibitory inputs to generate the ideal action potential. Contents of the board game’s box are accompanied by example cards, which players need to pick at each synapse. These can either represent excitatory/inhibitory inputs or homeostatic plasticity ‘saviour cards’, that act as rectifiers of the players’ balances. Now, let’s give our hard-working neurons a break and give their job a try: Will you be the most balanced signal at the axon initial segment?

See the full project here -

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0xeuiktokfn3ow5/Balancing_Minds_Final_K20061621.pdf?dl=0