A visit to the MBI

Kanapaha Middle School students listen to a presentation
by Albert Rhoton Jr., M.D.

The tour of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute of UF kicked off with Tetsuo Ashizawa, M.D., the institute’s director, telling students why the brain is so cool. Then, 80 gifted eighth-graders from Kanapaha Middle School filed into another room, where graduate students from the local chapter of the Society for Neuroscience passed around small, interactive experiments — such as tasting jellybeans and figuring out how the brain’s sense of taste works. But the crowning glory of the visit — surpassing the rest of the lab tours and research explanations — was the moment students crowded around a real human brain. The students’ teacher, Robyn Freeman, initially booked the tour in hopes that she would be able to get the students interested in a new area of science — a goal she successfully met. “We loved it,” Freeman said. “We’re going to try to make it a yearly thing.”