How does your brain change its mind? - Short film

Student - Kitty Finnie

Supervisor - Bill Edwards

This 2-minute 30-second illustrated YouTube animation draws on research from the Khan Lab to explore current neuroscientific understanding of how the brain generates flexible behaviour. It is targeted at GCSE students considering A-level Psychology or Biology and seeks to make neuroscience feel accessible while encouraging curiosity and further engagement with the subject. The animation follows the narrative of Sally, a mouse who encounters smoke in the woods. In one scenario, she runs away; in another, she runs towards it. This presents the central question driving the Khan Lab's research on how the brain produces opposing responses to the same stimulus. To investigate this, the animation travels to Sally’s Striatum, which is depicted as a plug socket. It uses this visual metaphor to explain how Striatal activity can produce different behaviours and introduces optogenetics as the method used to uncover this. A larger unanswered question is then raised within this metaphor: if the striatum is a plug socket, which parts of the brain switch it on in different ways to generate different behaviours? The animation closes by emphasising that, although the answer remains unknown, neuroscientists are working to find it.

See the full film (Password 'Scicomm') - Kitty.mov