Others Like “Multitasking: Brain Drain or Boost in Efficiency?” (top 20 results)
Does listening to classical music help or hinder concentration and performance on cognitive tasks? You'll need help from a teacher to design two short, age-appropriate worksheet tests for this experiment. The tests should be of equal difficulty. You'll also need the cooperation of several additional classroom teachers in order to test enough students (at least 50-100, see the Science Buddies resource: How Many Participants Do I Need?). Half the students will take test A while listening to…
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Do you love to listen to your MP3 player while you're exercising, or listen to songs on the Internet? The relatively recent development of MP3 technology has made it possible to take a stack of CD's and store them on a device no bigger than a deck of cards. How does the MP3 format squeeze all those CD's down so well, and can it go too far? Try this music science fair project to find out!
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Have you ever seen a great movie and then rushed out and bought its soundtrack? Did the soundtrack bring back the thrill of an action chase? Or the sadness one of the movie's characters felt? Music is a big part of the movie experience. It intensifies the emotions in scenes so that you do not just jump when that hairy spider comes around the corner, you scream! In this music science fair project, you will find out if happy, sad, scary, and action scenes in movies use music with the same…
Did you know that our brains are split into two parts, right inside our head? One half is the left brain and the other half is the right brain. Some people use one half of the brain more than the other half when they are doing certain activities, like talking or reading. The half that is used is sometimes tied to which hand they prefer to use. If someone likes to use their right hand when doing an activity, like drawing or throwing a ball, do they also prefer to use their right ear, eye, or…
How fast are computers? How quickly do you think they can do 100 million arithmetic problems? Try this science project to discover an easy way to measure how fast computers have become and whether or not your computer is a math whiz.
Important: this project was originally written in the mid-2000's, and computers have gotten a lot faster since then! The project will probably not work as intended if you run the code on a modern computer.
"Use it or lose it!" Sure, we all know physical exercise is important to keeping our bodies fit. But how important is physical exercise to your brain? In other words, is there any connection between an active body and increased brain power?
This is an easy project where you can test the effect of exercise on a critical brain function: memory.
Have you ever watched a great sports player and imitated his or her moves over and over again? Or have you ever felt really bad when someone got hurt or things just weren't going his or her way? If so, you might be surprised to learn that you have been practicing skills closely tied to lying! In this science fair project, you'll discover how your brain gets a workout when it moves from truth-telling to lying, and how you can detect the shift. That's no lie!
Have you ever noticed that hip-hop songs have a fast tempo, while country ballads are usually slow? Do you think there is a correlation between the number of beats per minute (bpm) in a song and the type of music? You can explore whether different genres of music have different bpm ranges by measuring the bpm in several different songs from a number of different genres. Bpm can be measured using free music software, like the one listed below in the Bibliography, or by counting all the beats you…
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Have you ever wondered about the various types of music in a video game you've played? You may not have
paid much attention to the music, but its job was to enhance your gaming experience. In fact, the
wrong kind of music can detract from the atmosphere of the game. Can you imagine the music in Mario
KartTM playing in Street Fighter®? In a game, music can indicate many different
things, such as a special or new event, shift of mood, or the arrival of a character. This kind of music is…
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Have you ever taken notes from the chalkboard during class and not noticed what was going on around you? Or have you ever been so focused on a task that you haven't seen other people around you? In both of these cases, you were paying attention, but you were seeing without seeing! This is called inattentional blindness and it's the topic that you will investigate in this human behavior science fair project. If you are interested in how the human brains perceives information, then this might…
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