Ciutadella Park in Barcelona has hosted on 15th and 16th June, the Festival of Science and Technology. The group of cognition and brain plasticity of the IDIBELL has participated, offering many activities to discover how our brain often makes us perceive things different to reality.

This is the first year that the researcher Lucía Vaquero participates in the Festival of Science. For her it has been an enriching experience. She has explained through several experiments the research of how our brain works. “We conducted an activity of optical illusions, with videos and images where we perceive things that are not really. It is funny how people, especially children, are surprised and gives rise to questions about how and why the brain deceives us” Vaquero said.

Joanna Sierpowska, also of cognition and brain plasticity research group, had participated in previous editions of the festival and this year she has repeated with a trap experiment on false memory explaining to participants how this brain process can have consequences in real life beyond the laboratory. “For example, it is important in legal field because people can come to remember details of a crime that are not real”.

The people who went through the tent of the Catalan Association of Research Institutions (ACER) could discover these deceptions of the brain as well as see in real time how changing the electrical activity of your brain by experiencing different emotions.

The Festival of Science and technology is organized by the Institute of Culture of the City of Barcelona and this year celebrated its seventh year with the goal that everyone who wants to discover and experience the hand of its protagonists searching and innovation that is done in Catalonia.