Science: Why Bother?

The brain makes just about everything happen – breathing, heart-beating, homework. It also sometimes makes mistakes - but never fear: there’s a way to keep that lump of goo on track.

Enter: science. In this session, Idan Ben-Barak reveals how science can help our brains find things out about the world. Whether you want to be a scientist, astronaut, athlete or artist – science is a friend to everyone.

• What is science anyway? Why do we do it? At its heart, it is a way of thinking and finding things out about the world. Without fooling other people or, very importantly, yourself.
• Instruments of science – physical and otherwise.
• The human brain (Lump) and how it evolved We use our brain for figuring out things about the world, but the brain finds it easier to think about things in a human scale – size, time, numbers, things we can see and perceive, things that it personally feels, human faces and expressions and emotions. It finds it harder to think about things that are too large, too small, or take a lot of time, or too complicated.
• You don’t need to become a scientist as a job – but you do need to know what science is, how it’s done, and how to tell when you’re being fooled – and when you’re trying to fool yourself.