Sometimes two seemingly unrelated problems are actually two parts of a single solution waiting to be found. Many people wonder what their brain activity looks like but never get access to the equipment that could show them. Researchers tend to study very limited populations because those are the only ones near university or hospital laboratories. If research could be conducted outside the lab, perhaps the researchers could go find study participants in the real world?
Last year, the NeuroEducate team sought to answer that question. We presented our findings at the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society conference in Los Angeles, California.

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Hello! My name is Ritu Gaikwad and I will be a rising high school senior next year. This post is about my internship at NeuroEducate.
I came upon the internship through my previous experience as a student at the Biotechnology and Biosciences camp at Stanford last summer. In the Neuroscience course that I took, my professor Amy Daitch presented a guest speaker, Elizabeth Ricker, the founder of Neuroeducate.

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Ever tried turning yourself into a human guinea pig?
Oddly enough, I have.
In attempts to improve my attention and memory, I have zapped my brain, altered my brainwaves, and even mailed my poop to a faraway lab. At other points, I tracked my time usage every five minutes using alarms and spreadsheets. I wrote down everything I ate. I went into a room full of strangers and laughed hysterically for an hour.
While this may sound bizarre, plenty of people are doing it. Some call themselves biohackers, others Quantified Selfers, others self-experimenters.
What if you were a human guinea pig already and you didn’t know it?

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If you had 15 minutes to improve your brain each morning, what would you do?

I’ve been in pursuit of this question for somewhere between half a decade and my entire lifetime. This mild obsession has taken me through neuroscience research at MIT and Harvard, tech startups, and ultimately, it turned me into a human guinea pig.

On a recent carpool back from Stanford, Adrian*, a 22 year-old scientist asked me how he might optimize his mental performance. He seemed genuinely curious, so I decided to answer in detail. We lived near each other in the city, so there was plenty of time remaining before either of us had to get dropped off.

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