Kate's diary

Aus-NZ Brain Bee Finals, 31 January 2010

In order to acclimatise to the difference in time and temperature between Wellington and Sydney, Mum and I flew there two days before the national finals of the Brain Bee challenge, held on Sunday 31 January.

On the flight, instead of studying, I watched a Miss Marple mystery - the first break I'd had from reading my neuroscience textbook in days! As we descended over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House, I knew we would have a great time in such a beautiful city, whatever the outcome of the competition.

I spent all Saturday studying frantically, trying to decide on the most important chapters to revise. The hotel room was soon strewn with photocopied pages, flash cards and badly drawn anatomical diagrams.

On Sunday morning, I was too nervous to eat breakfast. It didn't make me feel any better when, on our taxi ride to the University of Sydney Anatomy Museum, our taxi driver couldn't understand a word we were saying and handed us an unintelligible map, in the hope that we knew where we were going.

Even so, we were among the first to arrive and waited in the hot sun for the other contestants to turn up, parents and brothers and sisters in tow. It was great being able to recognise people from their profiles on the website, and to chat in real life after several weeks of avoiding each other on Facebook!

A warm welcome from the national coordinators Professor Linda Richards (Australasia) and Professor Louise Nicholson (New Zealand), and the New South Wales coordinator Professor Vaughan Macefield put us all at ease. Vaughan was very friendly and had a great sense of humour, but when he promised us a very tough competition, he wasn't joking.

He showed us through the historic building that houses the anatomy museum. It smelt like a very old church and had oil paintings of famous scientists hanging on the wood-panelled walls - rather like Hogwarts, as one of my fellow competitors commented. We wouldn't have been surprised to run into a straggly-bearded wizard, but were surprised to end up in a room filled with large blue bags containing partially dissected human bodies.

We were all rather glad when we left the room to go to the laboratory for the anatomy practical. Here Dr Luke Henderson explained our task - to identify pinned structures in 10 human brain specimens.

Having had two very helpful sessions at the Auckland University's Anatomy Learning Centre, I felt more confident in this section than in any other, and later found out that I'd scored the highest mark for the anatomy challenge - 28 out of 30.

After this, we were provided with a delicious morning tea, but as we were still too tense to eat, it was left for the parents and siblings while we completed the short answer questions of the contest. After studying a dense medical textbook for about a month, I was relieved that the questions were more straightforward than I had been expecting.

At lunchtime, we all decided it wasn't worth being nervous after we realised what ridiculous answers we had written for some of the questions, and tested each other on various diseases as we wolfed down our lunch.

At 1pm we headed into the most challenging part of the competition - patient diagnosis based on videos of real patients. The convenor, Dr Simon Lewis, explained to us that medical students and even the neuroscientists in the room would have found the diagnoses difficult. Dr Lewis was unapologetic - he told us that it was never a textbook that walked into a hospital - it was a patient who didn't know what his or her symptoms were 'supposed' to be.

Personally, I found it really hard to know, for example, whether it was a person's drooping eyelid or redness in the eye that was the symptom to be identified. If I did recognise a symptom or a group of symptoms, I was often unaware of the name of the disease or condition, as I had never encountered it before.

Although it was extremely difficult, this proved to be one of the most enlightening parts of the competition. It was a privilege to observe the heartbreaking experiences people were going through and shocking to find out that within weeks of filming one terribly disabled patient had made a full recovery, while another who had looked very casual and happy-go-lucky had passed away.

Another highlight of the event was the welcome reception at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre that evening. Linda and Louise introduced us to many eminent neuroscientists who shared their amazing work and discoveries with us. One was renowned for producing a neuroanatomy atlas and others for their work with the sense of smell and the function of the basal ganglia. Professor John Donoghue, of Brown University, Providence, MA, enthralled us with the work he does to help paralysed people use thought to control a computer.

The fourth and final part of the Brain Bee Challenge took place on Monday, 1 February, as a live question and answer oral quiz that was open to the public.

I was too nervous to eat the lunch box that was given to each of us. We each stood at 10 individual tables - Tharun and I in one corner of the room and the eight others facing the judging panel of neuroscientists. We were all asked the same question at the same time and had to write down our answer and then read it out. All the material tested came from the textbook Essential Neuroscience. There were 20 questions altogether. In Part A two points were given for each correct answer and in Part B one point for every correct answer.

I was dismayed to discover that because my surname begins with B, I would always be first to answer the question in each round. It was awful having to wait to find out if my answer was correct, and then if it was not, whether Tharun would answer correctly. The score was tracked on a screen behind us and for the duration of this part of the competition Tharun and I were practically neck and neck. It was incredibly nervewracking, especially when the panel members consulted one another to determine whether an answer was correct.

Such debates were remarkably common and longlasting and at one stage Vaughan broke the tension by saying "Is there a neuroscientist in the house?"

It was only once the scores of the previous parts of the competition were aggregated that each national winner could be announced. Then it was all hugs and great feelings of relief and euphoria and heaps of smiling for the cameras - we all agreed that having to smile so much that it hurt was the most challenging part of the competition.

As a New Zealander I was proud that Tharun and I performed as well as the Australian winner and runner-up, and I attribute that to the wonderful support we received in this country.

I wish to thank Professor Nicholson for organising my two trips to Auckland University where I learned such a lot from her and her colleagues, including Professor Richard Faull, Dr's Maurice Curtis and Jennifer Somerfield, and PhD student Toby Lowe. The Anatomy Learning Centre is a very special resource that we are fortunate to have here in New Zealand.

I am also very grateful for the support of my science teacher Mrs Gabrielle Gunn who gave me so much of her time during the summer holidays and helped me bridge the gap between understanding the language used in Year 10 Biology to that of a tertiary medical textbook.

Finally a big thank you to the hosts, sponsors and organisers. The whole event was a spectacular success - a wonderful opportunity to make new friends and to learn more about the fascinating workings of the brain.