We’re excited to continue our collaboration with Grande Ronde and Siletz tribal communities, and bring art and neuroscience outreach participants to Oregon’s Lincoln and Yamhill counties in October for a Spirit Mountain Community Fund supported effort to explore tantalizing connections between tales and brains with K-12 students, teachers, artists, storytellers and musicians…
LEARN MORE: Synapses & Stories: Coyote, Grizzly & their Brains!
LEARN MORE: Synapses, Stories & Song!
To that end, we’ve partnered with the Intel Native American Network, and are currently discussing new “Noggin Boxes” filled with pipe cleaners, pens, paper, simple electrophysiological recording devices and 3D printed brains for delivery to multiple classrooms this fall…
LEARN MORE: Teachers, Noggin, OPAHEC & Intel!
And we’re also indebted to our community minded friends at BioGift, huge supporters of STEM and STEAM, where our graduate and undergraduate volunteers have enjoyed invaluable educational visits and picked up extraordinary dissection skills (and some extraordinary educational specimens too!)…
The jaw and skull of a Northwest cougar. Dissection is a uniquely powerful technique for acquiring intimate, accurate and persistent knowledge of anatomy (and neuroanatomy) relevant to research, medicine, and a better understanding of the “fabric of Nature.”
LEARN MORE: Adventure A-Head
LEARN MORE: BioGifting Brains
LEARN MORE: A BioGift of Brains
We returned to BioGift this week to gather new experience and knowledge – and more stories! – from explorations of animal anatomy that we’re excited to share with students in K-12 this fall…
Aaron Eisen (an undergraduate from Psychology and the Neuroscience Club at Portland State University), Kanani Miyamoto (an artist, PNCA graduate and Noggin Resource Council member), and Denesa Oberbeck (an OHSU researcher and member of the NW Noggin Board) joined Andrew Hardy at BioGift to help make our donated bear, cougar, badger and fox skulls (and brains!) more presentable for schools…
We enjoyed a busy afternoon with expert tools, scraping and scooping and cleaning off mandibles, maxillas and sphenoid bones – to the best of our ability!
The jaw of a badger…
This is hard work! We ultimately decided that the best route for proper “de-fleshing” would be the use of larder beetles, a time honored technique of taxidermists. Larder beetles consume flesh, and these insects, along with other members of the Dermestidae family, are often introduced as evidence in criminal cases by forensic entomologists to help determine time of death…
LEARN MORE: Use of larder beetles (Coleoptera: Dermestidae) to deflesh human jaws
LEARN MORE: The use of insects in forensic investigations: An overview on the scope of forensic entomology
LEARN MORE: Estimation of Postmortem Interval Using Arthropod Development and Successional Patterns
LEARN MORE: Forensic Entomology in Criminal Investigations
Thanks to the tremendous generosity of Bob Bicknell, the owner of Beacon Hill Biological Services (“the largest osteological preparation firm in the West”) and SkullDuggery, in Toutle, WA, we should soon have some of the cleanest bear, cougar, badger and fox skulls around!
We’ll save the brain. Cougar skull (with brain) before beetles; after image coming in about a month…
Bob also gifted us a gracefully prepared coyote skull, in recognition of the importance of Coyote in so many Native traditions and tales…
The complex details of nasal bone structure are strikingly visible in the clean Coyote skull…
LEARN MORE: Adventure A-Head
LEARN MORE: Is Your Brain Fractal?
Coyote is a compelling figure in stories because he is a Trickster. He causes trouble and recklessly (and often humorously) violates social rules, often paying dearly for his transgressions. Coyote stories are popular and engrossing, illustrating decisions and consequences which help young people with developing brains transiently escape and also learn more about social behavioral expectations in their own community…
“The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him and even the flea would desert him for a velocipede.” ― Mark Twain
LEARN MORE: The Oregon Encyclopedia on Coyote (legend)
Esther Stutzman, a celebrated Kalapuya/Coos storyteller awarded the 2017 Oregon Governor’s Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement, told a particularly captivating Coyote tale this summer at the Indian Education Camp she’s run for 42 years!
LEARN MORE: Siletz Stories, Singing, Dancing & Brains!
And no foolin’ – we are unquestionably looking forward to more brains, skulls, neuroscience research, art, songs, stories and school visits this fall!
“A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.”
- From the poem “Piute Creek,” by Gary Snyder
