Teachers & Students

Brainiac is for teachers in high school, college, university as an excitingly visual and interactive way for their students to understand how brain neurons, synapses, and action potentials work.

Brainiac simulates the actual voltages on each neuron and synapse at every point in time (i.e., this is not an artificial, neural network), so Brainiac is a highly visual and interactive way to learn how brain neurons and synapses actually behave.

Brainiac is Open Source so its code, its library of brains, everything is free without fee to download, run, and modify.

It comes with a library of tiny brains (less than 10 neurons), where each brain can be used to build a lesson plan to visually teach a different concept such as:

  • excitatory (positive) feedforward;

  • inhibitory (negative) feedforward;

  • excitatory (positive) feedback loop;

  • inhibitory (negative) feedback loop;

  • temporal summation;

  • spatial summation; and

  • synaptic weights’ influence on the post-neuron response.

You’re welcome to explore this teaching video which features one of the tiny brains.

A tiny brain is less than 15 lines of Python code, making it easy for more advance students to edit the brain, to experiment with adding new neurons and synapses, and to learn Python along the way.

Since Brainiac is also used by researchers, students can go as deep as they want.

Brainiac is a highly visual and interactive way to learn how brain neurons and synapses actually behave.

The GUI color codes the neurons as they are firing, and this visual simulation can be single-stepped, started, paused, and rewound to any point in time.

Also, the GUI allows students to click on a neuron to see its synapses and which neurons those synapses are going to or coming from.

A voltage plot of the neuron’s voltage potential over time can be plotted along with the voltage plots of it’s pre-synaptic neurons.

Brainiac, its brains, and its API are all written in Python.

More Info

This video shows a Brainiac brain that knows how to play Sudoku. It has 3,600 neurons and 78,732 synapses. The user interface has been color-coded to indicate neurons firing at high frequency in orange, at medium frequency in green, at low frequency in blue, and neurons that are not firing in black. The white numbers were already provided as clues in this Sudoku puzzle, and the yellow numbers are guesses by the brain as it figures out the solution.

This video is a replay of the Brainiac GUI simulating a 400-neuron, 19,263-synapse Brainiac brain with an eye and an ear that is learning to associate the sound “X” with the written letter “X.” Once this brain has learned the association, if it hears an X but doesn’t see one, the visual X neuron will still fire because the brain is recalling the association.