It will be young brains versus young brains when a Nanaimo teenager competes in a spelling-bee-style, national neuroscience contest today.
Katrina Vizely, 17, a Grade 12 student at Cedar Community Secondary School, is one of 13 high school students from across Canada competing at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., in the seventh annual Canadian National Brain Bee.
Vizely said she’s a little nervous. “A lot of very smart kids are going to be there.”
The Brain Bee is sponsored by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. It’s meant as a creative way to motivate students to consider careers in neuroscience.
The winner earns a $1,500 prize, a trophy and an internship at a neuroscience laboratory in Canada. He or she will also be invited to compete in the International Brain Bee in Washington D.C. in August. Second and third Canadian prizes are $1,000 and $500.
Vizely said she first heard about the Brain Bee while working as an intern last summer at the B.C. Cancer Agency.
Always interested in science, particularly medical science, she enrolled, winning the regional contest in Victoria this month against five other Vancouver Island students.
She answered questions such as: What secondary messenger gets released at a metabotropic receptor? Answer: A G-protein. Or: What disorder is the drug L-DOPA used to treat? Answer: Parkinson’s disease.
Vizely played on the school basketball team for eight years. She is also active on student council and the violin club and does musical theatre.
She was introduced to neuroscience when she completed a first-year psychology course from Vancouver Island University.
Vizely has already enrolled to study science at the University of Victoria in September and is likely aiming for some branch of medicine.
Neuroscience, the study of the nervous system, has mushroomed during the past decade to become an interdisciplinary field.
It draws from areas such as human and animal behaviour studies, chemistry, computers, engineering, linguistics, medicine and psychology.
Judith Shedden, cognitive neuroscientist and associate professor at McMaster University and chairwoman of the Canadian National Brain Bee, said the event started at the University of Maryland in the 1990s.
Shedden said it was a time when neuroscience got a major boost. Technology such as magnetic resonance imaging improved and allowed medical researchers to examine the brain as never before.
“We could look, non-invasively, at the functioning brain,” said Shedden.
“Lots of technology seemed to come together to open up what was the last frontier.”
Neuroscience is now recognized as an enormous field with many avenues for study, research and career.
“With neuroscience, you can think of people in laboratories at the counters, doing hard science, identifying neural transmitters and looking at single cells and studying what’s going on at the molecular level,” said Shedden.
“Neuroscience can also include health sciences, medicine,” she said.
“There are brain diseases and the kinds of things that go wrong when we get brain injuries.”
Neuroscience also includes things such as behavioural studies of the actions and interactions of humans and animals. Her own field examines how humans and animals learn and allocate attention span.
“All of these things are relevant to an understanding of how the brain works,” Shedden said.
She said brain bees are held annually in 40 counties. The International Brain Bee moves from country to country every year. Last year, it was in Vienna, Austria, the year before in Cape Town, South Africa.
Shedden said the Canadian national competition at McMaster University will follow the same spelling-bee format with some additions.
For example, students will be presented with preserved human-brain tissue with sections identified with numbered pins. They will then say what bodily function, action or feeling is controlled by the identified section.
They will also be presented with actors, each trained to mimic the symptoms of a specific neurological disorder, and the students will be required to make a diagnosis.
Many of the questions and techniques are used to train doctors at McMaster Health Sciences, so the questions are challenging.
“Our goal is to attract some of the top high school students from across the country,” Shedden said.
“Students don’t normally get a lot of attention that would lead them to realize there is a whole field out there in neuroscience and brain research.”