You are in: Home » Events » Science Week events » Science Week events 2007
Science Week events 2007: Exploring Mind and Brain
Saturday 24 March 2007, 2-5pm
As part of the Cambridge Science Festival we organised an afternoon of talks exploring a small part of the research work being carried out here at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
Please note that capacity is limited by the size of our Lecture Theatre, and so seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
The Park and Ride service from Trumpington car park stops at the Nuffield Hospital, which is just at the end of Chaucer Road. If you are disabled and require a parking space to be reserved on site, this can be arranged.
Directions to the Unit are available.
Programme of talks
2.00-2.30: Following your heart: Is there a role for the body in shaping decision-making?
Speaker: Barney Dunn
The English language is filled with phrases such as 'follow your heart' or 'trust your gut instincts', reflecting a commonly held assumption that how we think and feel may in part relate to the perception of changes occurring in our bodies. These bodily feedback theories have tended to be viewed sceptically within the scientific community. This talk will review the scientific status of the notion that feedback from the body can influence how we make 'intuitive' decisions, presenting results from recent experiments conducted by the Emotion Group at the CBU. These show that how well we can make advantageous decisions in part depends on activity in the body that occurs immediately prior to us making a choice. In anticipation of profitable (relative to unprofitable) choices on a computerised decision-making task, individuals sweated less and their heart rate slowed to a greater extent. Further, people who were good at perceiving activity in their body (for example, could accurately monitor their heartbeat) showed the best overall performance on the gambling task. These data support the idea that perception of changes in the body may play an important part in shaping our decision-making. Finally, the talk will discuss whether disturbances in these bodily signals might be able to account for some of the emotional and decision-making symptoms seen in common mental health problems like depression and anxiety.
2.30-3.00: Memory and its Disorders
Speaker: Karalyn Patterson
Most of us probably think of memory primarily as remembering events from the past (e.g. "I remember that when I went to Rome, I could not see the Sistine Chapel because the Pope needed it") and/or as remembering things that need to be done (e.g. "I must remember to return those DVDs to the rental shop"). In addition to these two important forms of memory, all varieties of knowledge – e.g. that Rome is the capital of Italy, that DVDs can be rented from shops, even our knowledge of words like 'chapel' or acronyms like DVD – represent forms of memory that are (a) learned from experience, (b) more (or sometimes less!) successfully retrievable throughout a normal person's life, and (c) vulnerable to various forms of brain injury or disease. At the CBU, we conduct studies of normal and disordered memory using cognitive experiments, brain imaging techniques, and computer models. This talk will skim the surface of the surprisingly varied and complex forms of memory needed to manage even the simplest kinds of human activities, and will summarise a little of what we know about the relationship between forms of memory and brain structures.
3.00-3.45: Tea and Practical EXPERIMENTS
Tea and practical experiments.
3.45-4.15: Detecting awareness in the Vegetative State
Speaker: Adrian Owen
The vegetative state is arguably one of the least understood and most ethically troublesome neurological conditions in modern medicine. The term describes a rare disorder in which patients who emerge from coma appear to be awake, but show no signs of awareness. Assessment of these patients can be extremely difficult, as their motor responses may be minimal, inconsistent, and difficult to document, or may be undetectable because no speech or actions are possible. In this talk, I will describe a series of studies demonstrating that brain imaging is a powerful new tool for identifying residual cognitive function and even conscious awareness in some patients who are assumed to be vegetative, yet retain abilities that have evaded detection using standard clinical methods of assessment.
4.15-4.45: From mouth to meaning: How the brain makes sense of spoken language
Speaker: Matt Davis
In this talk, we'll follow a spoken sentence on a journey that starts with the mouth and vocal chords of a speaker, through the ear and into the brain of a listener who understands what is being said. Along the way, we'll discover what information is found in speech sounds, and how they are decoded by the listener. We'll consider the building blocks from which words are constructed and taken apart when we read or listen. We'll also learn about how and where words are stored in the brain, as well as the neural juggling act involved in combining word meanings, so as to understand sentences, appreciate poetry and groan at puns.
If you would like to help us with our research, you could become a member of our Volunteer Panel.