Higher School of Economics (National Research University)

In Russia Neuroscience is a very fast developing scientific field. However, the public understanding of brain organization and functioning is unacceptably poor. Thus, we’ve got up with the idea of organizing the 1st Brain Awareness Week in our city. Our BAW events included 5 types of activities for different types of the audience: 1) Interactive lectures delivered to senior school children (14-18 years old) at schools during their biology or chemistry lessons. In these lectures we explained the general principles of brain structure and functioning, the modern methods for brain investigation (EEG, MEG, fMRI, optogenetics, etc.) and cutting-edge neurotechnologies, like brain-computer interface. Each lecture took ~45min but the questions, including those about career in science, and discussion sometimes lasted for 2 and more hours! 2) A short cycle of science-popular lectures for university students (>18 years old) from nonbiological fields. 3) Workshops for children (3-10 years old) consisting of games and hand-crafting exercises allowing them to learn the basis of brain organization and functioning. It loos that their parents have 4) Open-access lectures for general public on different “brain” topics, including memory mechanisms and neuroeconomics. 5) Interview to the media on “how does our brain take its decisions”. Initially all events were planned between the 14th and the 20th of March but the public interest was so great that we were asked to make more events even until mid-April! On the whole, our first BAW experience was extremely positive: it evoked great public interest to neuroscience and provided us with new forces and enthusiasm to organize our second BAW next year!

We were extremely surprised by the immediate positive outcome of our participation in the BAW. First of all, it enormously increased the visibility and recognition of our organization. We received many new contacts, offers and invitations from both scientific and public organizations, as well as from media representatives. We have also met very motivated students who would like to continue their career in science and who want to have a training with us.

When planning the calendar, it’s good to now the local peculiarities of the life style. It turned out that in our city events for children were less attended on….. holidays and week-ends (!) because then children traditionally go out of the city. The same for university students: take care that your BAW events do not fall into local period of exams. Otherwise the students will go to the library and not to your BAW events.