The Cockroach Beatbox

When you think about the brain, it's difficult to understand, because if I were to ask you right now, how does the heart work, you would instantly tell me it's a pump. It pumps blood. If I were to ask about your lungs, you would say it exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide. That's easy. If I were to ask you how the brain works, it's hard to understand because you can't just look at a brain and understand what it is. It's not a mechanical object, not a pump, not an airbag. It's just like, if you held it in your hand when it was dead, it's just a piece of fat.

To understand how the brain works, you have to go inside a living brain. Because the brain's not mechanical, the brain is electrical and it's chemical. Your brain is made out of 100 billion cells, called neurons. And these neurons communicate with each other with electricity. And we're going to eavesdrop in on a conversation between two cells, and we're going to listen to something called a spike. But we're not going to record my brain or your brain or your teachers' brains, we're going to use our good friend the cockroach. Not just because I think they're cool, but because they have brains very similar to ours. So if you learn a little bit about how their brains work, we're going to learn a lot about how our brains work.

I'm going to put them in some ice water here. And then --

Audience: Ew!

Greg Gabe: Yeah ... Right now they're becoming anesthetized. Because they're cold-blooded, they become the temperature of the water and they can't control it so they just basically "chillax," right? They're not going to feel anything, which may tell you a little about what we're going to do, a scientific experiment to understand the brain. So ...

This is the leg of a cockroach. And a cockroach has all these beautiful hairs and pricklies all over it. Underneath each one of those is a cell, and this cell's a neuron that is going to send information about wind or vibration. If you ever try to catch a cockroach, it's hard because they can feel you coming before you're even there, they start running. These cells are zipping up this information up to the brain using those little axons with electronic messages in there.

We're going to record by sticking a pin right in there. We need to take off the leg of a cockroach -- don't worry, they'll grow back -- then we're going to put two pins in there. These are metal pins. One will pick up this electronic message; this electric message is going by. So, we're now going to do the surgery, let's see if you guys can see this.

Yeah, it's gross ... All right. So there we go. You guys can see his leg right there. Now I'm going to take this leg, I'm going to put it in this invention that we came up with called the Spikerbox -- and this replaces lots of expensive equipment in a research lab, so you guys can do this in your own high schools, or in your own basements if it's me.

(Audience: Laughter)

So, there. Can you guys see that? Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and turn this on. I'm going to plug it in.

(Tuning sound)

To me, this is the most beautiful sound in the world. This is what your brain is doing right now. You have 100 billion cells making these raindrop-type noises. Let's take a look at what it looks like; let's pull it up on the iPad screen. I plugged my iPad into here as well.

So remember we said the axon looks like a spike. So we're going to take a look at what one of them looks like in just a brief second. We're going to tap here so we can sort of average this guy. So there we see it. That's an action potential. You've got 100 billion cells in your brain doing this right now, sending all this information back about what you're seeing, hearing.

We also said this is a cell that's going to be taking up information about vibrations in the wind. So what if we do an experiment? We can actually blow on this and hear if we see a change. Are you guys going to be ready? If I blow on it you tell me if you hear anything.

(Blowing)

(Sound changes)

Let me just touch this with a little pen here.

(Noise)

That was the neural firing rate. That actually took a while in neuroscience to understand this. This is called rate coding: the harder you press on something, the more spikes there are, and all that information is coming up to your brain. That's how you perceive things.

So that's one way of doing an experiment with electricity. The other way is that your brain is not only taking in electrical impulses, you're also sending out. That's how you move your muscles around. Let's see what happens if I've plugged in something that's electric into the cockroach leg here.

I'm going to take two pins, I'm going to plug them onto the cockroach. I'm going to take the other end, I'm going to plug it into my iPod. It's my iPhone actually. Do you guys know how your earbuds work in your ears? You have a battery in your phone, or iPod, right? It's sending electrical current into these magnets in your earbuds which shake back and forth and allow you to hear things.

But that current's the same currency that our brain uses, so we can send that to our cockroach leg and hopefully if this works, we can actually see what happens when we play music into the cockroach. Let's take a look.

(Music beat)

Can we turn it up? There we go.

(Audience reacts and gasps)

GG: So what's happening?

Audience: Wow!

(Laughter)

So you see what's moving. It's moving on the bass. All those audiophiles out there, if you have awesome, kicking car stereos, you know, the bass speakers are the biggest speakers. The biggest speakers have the longest waves, which have the most current, and the current is what's causing these things to move.

So it's not just speakers that are causing electricity. Microphones also cause electricity.

(Beat)

So I'm going to go ahead and invite another person out on the stage here to help me out with this. So there we go.

(Beatboxing)

This is the first time this has ever happened in the history of mankind. Human beatbox to a cockroach leg. When you guys go back to your high school, think about neuroscience and how you guys can begin the neuro-revolution.

Thank you very much. Bye bye.

(Applause)