Events

Ana Carolina Saraiva (ACS), a first year PhD student at the Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, and Xun Yu Choong (XYC), a first year student on the four-year PhD programme in Clinical Neuroscience, report on the 13th Queen Square Symposium, held on 16 March.

What began as a small event over a decade ago has developed to become the primary student-led conference in Queen Square (QS).

The QS Symposium is organised by students for students, bringing them together across departments, and aims to provide a platform to showcase the diversity of scientific research carried out in the UCL Institute of Neurology. The format for this was presenting posters about research projects.

This year showcased a variety of high-quality research, ranging from cognitive to clinical studies of neuroscience and neurology. How does the menstrual cycle affect perception of emotional faces? Are enlarged perivascular spaces on MRI a new imaging window for cerebral small vessel diseases?

This was an opportunity for the bright minds of the future to show us what they’ve got!

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Dr Mark Lythgoe (UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging) took the audience of his Lunch Hour Lecture on 13 March on a journey to explore the greatest brain of the 20th century. The lecture to mark Brain Awareness Week drew in a large crowd; potentially explained by the promise of seeing a real brain!

The journey began with a video clip of Dr Lythgoe and Dr Jim Al-Khalili from the programme The Riddle of Einstein’s Brain (Channel 4, National Geographic USA, 2005). The two presenters were getting into a red convertible in southern California and setting off in search of the brain of Albert Einstein.

The presenters could not agree, however, on where genius originates from and consequently where it can be found. Is genius determined by biology and therefore can Einstein’s brain show us how? Or is genius a culturally dependent term that lives in the ideas produced?

Dr Lythgoe threw the question to the audience: “Did Einstein need to have published his work to be considered a genius? Or if he had done exactly the same amount of work and drawn the same conclusions, but never published, would he still be a genius?”

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Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a cognitive neuroscientist who researches something many of us find mysterious – the teenage brain. She believes that our adolescent years are a period of great change in terms of brain activity and being able to untangle what is going on could have wide-ranging implications for education. I went along to her lecture at the British Science Festival to find out more.

A newborn baby has nearly the same number of brain cells as an adult, an astounding 100 billion. The difference, as you might already know, are the connections between the nerve cells, or neurons, which change massively over the course of a person’s life.

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Ilaria Mirabile, a fourth year PhD student in neuroscience at the Institute of Neurology, MRC Prion Unit, and Savroop Bhamra, a second year PhD student at the institute, report on the UCL Neuroscience Symposium 2011, held on 1 July.

Think about him, that boring professor you struggle to follow on a rainy Monday morning lecture…Think about how you fight to stay awake at the monotonous sound of his voice. Think about those nebulous concepts that (“almost”) put you out of science. Now, breathe with relief. It all belongs to the past. UCL’s Neuroscience community is bustling and exciting with engaging professors that know how to captivate their audience.

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