The science behind META

Post date: Apr 13, 2016 1:37:55 PM

By Lucia M Weinberg

The science behind Meta is formed by a team of PhD students and our supervisor who work on understanding how the brain develops during the teenage years and how this impacts behaviour. Iroise Dumontheil is a researcher at Birkbeck College and our supervisor. She has been working closely with the team from the start, advising on neuroscience to inform the writing and the staging of play. Recently, she also briefed the actors and students on brain basics, to bring all of us up to speed.

Annie, Georgie, Rosy, Christina, Irene and I are all doing our PhDs, and will attend the performances with Iroise to answer questions the audience might have on how the brain develops and how this can affect teenagers’ abilities to regulate their emotions. Hopefully, this will shed further light on the play development and in the audience’s reflections around what the actors are experiencing.

As part of our training, we have been working hard on our communication skills. We usually speak in front of audiences full of scientists, so our challenge has been learning to get our ideas across to people with different backgrounds, helping to make sense of terms such as “amygdala”, “fMRI”, and “frontal cortex”. We had a training session with Tony McBride, from Cardboard Citizens, in which we explored the opportunities and challenges of public engagement. We also practiced our presentation skills and got very useful feedback from both Tony and some of the actors on how to speak in a way that is understandable and engaging.

In the lab, our work with teenagers involves having them play computer games so we can measure how quickly and precisely they can solve them. We also scan their brains to see how they react to our experiments. Sometimes, we go to schools to do some testing there. With this research we hope to contribute to furthering our understanding of a unique time in our lives and development.

We are really passionate about what we study, and that is why we like to share these findings with a wider audience, particularly adolescents. Meta is a unique opportunity to reach out. We are really excited about being part such a collaborative and dynamic project in which we can pose questions and find their answers together!

Lucia in action!