What Can a Fish Tell Us About The Human Brain? - Short film

Student - Mariana Cameiro De Sousa

Supervisor - Robert Hindge

This project is a five-minute promotional video introducing the Hindges Lab and its research on neural circuit development to a non-specialist audience with assumed GCSE-level scientific knowledge. The video opens with a hook designed to turn potential skepticism, why study a fish?,  into curiosity, before explaining why zebrafish are powerful model organism: transparent, fast-developing, and genetically similar to humans, making them ideal for watching the brain wiring. Using zebrafish as a narrative thread, the video moves through the lab's main research questions and approaches, with lab members explaining how they study synapse formation, visual circuit development, brain plasticity, and the genetic basis of psychiatric conditions, each anchoring their work to value, what it ultimately tells us about human development. Throughout, lab members speaking directly to camera are interwoven with footage of the lab environment, experimental apparatus, and simple animations to make the science feel tangible and accessible. The video closes by drawing these threads together, with the aim of establishing the relevance and value of the lab's foundational research, work that is occasionally overlooked due to a lack of immediate clinical translation and an unconventional model system, but which is essential to understanding how the brain is built.

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