| Welcome to Focus Education's Pages of images and facts about your brain and the way it works | |
We are currently creating lots of new Cool Stuff - so stay tuned!
| The fastest schools for the various brain workshop activities Focus Education runs. | |
| Here are some things to get your brain working harder! | |
| The way our brains work can sometimes mean we can be fooled by what we see. | |
| Play some simple games to help you understand your brain. | |
| Here are some 3D images of brains and brain parts. | |
| Some amazing facts about your brain | |
| Some True or False Questions about your brain. | |
| Free images to use for projects on the brain | |
| Step-by-step instructions to make your own cutaway model brain |
If you have any problems or suggestions with this page, please contact us and we will happily receive any input you may have.
During our Brain workshops, we runvarious games and, because we are the only ones running this competition, we can honestly say that these are the world records!
| World Records |
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| Pictograms |
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Try to guess the saying or phrase from a picture
Your brain doesn't always see what your eyes see.
Here's some examples:
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Dots that are white
while looking at them, black when you're not! |
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Is this a spiral? Follow tht lines
with your finger |
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Mystical Wheel - is it moving?
Trace your eyes around the rim. |
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Are these lines parallel? Measure them |
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Are these? |
Your eyes are basically like television cameras. They simply collect the light you see and pass it to your brain in a way that your brain can make sense of it. The problem is that your brain makes some assumptions about what it sees. In other words it takes a guess at some parts of what you see. Certain types on image can "fool" your brain into thinking something is happening when it isn't.
Find Your Blind Spot!
Here's what you do:
Open the image below by clicking on the thumbnail. There is a dot and a cross. You can print this out or just do it on the screen. Cover your left eye and move yourself away from your screen or printout so that you are looking directly at the dot from some distance away. Keep looking directly at the dot and move towards it. As you do so, the cross will move away from you in the corner of your eye. At some point the cross will disappear! As you keep moving in, it will re-appear and continue moving out. If you move back and forth, you will see the cross appear and disappear. This will demonstrate the edges of your blind spot. Just to check, cover your right eye and do the same - no blind spot! That's because your left eye's blind spot is to the left of the dot. You can check this one as well by turning the printout upside down if you've printed the image.
Why Does it work?
Your brain is connected to the back of both of your eyes by your Optic Nerve. Where the nerve connects to your eyeball, there is a patch that cannot detect images. The blind spot isn't at the sides of your vision but quite close to the centre. So why can you see everywhere and not see a "hole" in your vision? There are two reasons. Firstly, you have two eyes, so one fills in the gap from the other's blind spot. The problem is, if you cover one eye, you can still see everywhere - or so you think! Your brain seems to cover the hole so that it is not obvious when you look. Your brain seems to blur the surrounding area together so that you think the area inside the blind spot looks the same as everywhere around it.
It is this that actually allows you to see the blind spot. If you look at a small image that will fit completely inside your blind spot, your brain will "erase" it from your vision by blurring the surrounding area.
| Grid Game |
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Test your concentration skills by finding the number sequence before the timer runs out.
Under Construction - please check back soon
Did You Know:
| 1. | Your brain weighs about one third of a kilogram when born and eventually could weight as much as 1.7 kilograms |
| 2. | For doctors in Australia to declare that you are legally dead, they need to check for electrical activity in your brain stem. If there isn't any - that's it - your dead! Mind you. if there wasn't any electrical activity in your brain stem, you wouldn't know about it anyway! |
| 3. | Scientists in the 1970's and then 1980's believed that technology was developing so fast that we could build an artificial brain by the turn of the last century. What they didn't realise is that brain research has been showing that the human brain is so much more complicated than a computer that scientists are now saying that may not be possible for another twenty years! |
| 4. | When you sleep, your brain doesn't slow down like the rest of your body. In fact, at some stages during the night, your brain actually works harder than it does during the day. |
| 5. | A dolphin's brain is much bigger and more complicated than a human brain. Does it make them smarter than us? Scientists think not. In fact brain size doesn't have a lot to do with how smart you are. Albert Einstein's brain was apparently below average in size for a human being. |
| 6. | Research is being done to enable devices such as cameras and calculators to be "plugged in" to the human brain. This could allow blind people to see or let humans "see" radio waves and heat signatures. Imagine being able to see in the dark! |
| 7. | To cure severe epilepsy in really young people, doctors can remove one half of the brain ( a "hemispherectomy"). This cures the problem and most people go on to lead a perfectly normal life! |
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8. |
Drugs that effect your brain like alcohol tend to last for short periods of time in your brain. Some illegal drugs like marajuana can still be affecting your brain months after you ingest a single dose! Some drugs such as L.S.D. can severely and permanently damage your brain after only a very short period of sustained use. |
Under Construction - please check back soon
Disclaimer: These pages contain both Focus Education and Public Domain Imagery. Imagery developed by Focus education and carrying Focus Education accreditation may not be copied or used away from this site without prior written permission. Other imagery not containing accreditation is either in the existing Public Domain or has been created for the public domain by Focus Education Australia for general use. If you believe that an image is being displayed here that is not Public Domain, please notify us immediately and we will remove the image. webmaster@focuseducation.com.au
