Ron Hoy: Making novel neuroscience tools for the classroom via CD-ROM

Ron Hoy

By Susan Lang

Neuroscience for high schoolers? Why not, says Cornell neurobiologist Ron Hoy. To prove his point that the subject can be exciting for young people to study, Hoy and a Cornell development team of colleagues and undergraduates have developed a suite of novel, interdisciplinary multimedia teaching tools.

The teaching aids, with descriptive names like Koé (Japanese for "voice") and Fruit Fly, take neuroscience out of the realm of the just plain technical and difficult and instead present the field as encompassing everything from cognition, behavior and neurogenetics to communication, engineering and music.

The tools -- for university students and high schoolers -- were discussed by Hoy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20.

Koé is a CD-ROM that explores sound, allowing the student to build a virtual audio studio from simpler instruments and then use the studio to explore the physics and psychoacoustics of sound, speech and music. Fruit Fly, also a CD-ROM, explores neurogenetics -- the relationship between brain and behavior -- using the familiar fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as the experimental model.

Modern research has shown that a remarkable number of genes that are linked to human behavioral disorders have their counterparts in the fruit fly, and the CD-ROM explores this relationship.

Hoy is developing Koé with a team of Cornell computer science undergraduates, led by Nicholas Burlett and Darius Samerotte. "It can capture a sound -- such as speech, song, music animal sounds -- [and] portray a visual representation of the sound, allow you to manipulate it using a virtual studio with sound analysis and synthesis instruments and then incorporate it into a lab notebook, a musical composition or put it in an audio 'album,'" said Hoy, who is the David and Dorothy Merksamer Professor of Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.

Koé works in real time, allowing the user, for example, to see what happens to sound if the high frequencies are removed from speech, which tends to occur as people age, Hoy said.

Fruit Fly tackles how genes not only affect physiology and anatomy but also the brain and behavior, such as the role of genetics in neurological diseases, and disorders of the senses such as blindness and deafness as well as problems with learning, memory or susceptibility to recreational drugs.

The CD-ROM is modeled on Hoy's successful Project Crawdad, a commercial multimedia CD-ROM that is a lab manual for teaching neurophysiology by using the common crayfish as a model.

"We hope that the resources we are developing will fill a gap for teachers and students with multimedia materials because there are few resources out there to teach teachers about brain and behavior, as opposed to the mountains of material on topics such as cell and molecular biology," said Hoy.

The development of the CD-ROMs is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.