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Archive for the 'Brain Sciences' Category

Whatcha guvnor: inside the mind of a London cabbie

By Clare S Ryan, on 28 November 2013

London’s black taxis – or cabs – are as iconic as Big Ben, red buses and the London Eye, so it was no surprise to arrive to a packed audience at Dr Hugo Spiers’s (UCL Cognitive, Perceptual & Brain Sciences) Lunch Hour Lecture on 21 November.

The lecture was a whistle stop tour of the brains of a London cabbie, famously studied by UCL neuroscientists for more than 15 years.

London cabbies – what’s the big deal?
The Great Exhibition of 1851 gave birth to the London cabbie as we know it: the deficiency of the taxi service at the time became widely publicised and, in response, the first test for London’s taxi drivers was devised, called the London Knowledge.

Today, drivers who can complete ‘the Knowledge’ are able to perform amazing feats of memory multiple times a day. To pass the test, they must memorise more than 25,000 streets and one thousand sites of interest so that they can mentally map the route from any point in London to any other.

Learning the knowledge takes three years (similar to a UCL undergraduate degree) and the exam is rarely passed first time.

As a result of this gruelling training, the brains of cabbies are of particular interest to neuroscientists, as they can be used to study lots of interesting questions, such as does special memory change the shape of cabbies’ brains? How does the brain navigate space? And, fundamentally, how does memory work?

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Communicating without words: the power of art as a tool of expression

By news editor, on 24 October 2013

pencil-iconWritten by Maria Black, retired UCL clinical linguist

The exhibition at the Lumen Gallery

What would you do if a stroke or head injury robbed you of your ability to communicate verbally? How would you preserve your sense of self and connection to the world if understanding language became unreliable, your speech disappeared, or your capacity to read and write shrank?

‘Communicating without words’, an innovative exhibition organised by the UCL Communication Clinic, offers us a unique opportunity to explore these questions through the art and experiences of artists with language and communication difficulties. The free exhibition takes place  from 14-29 October 2013 in The Lumen Gallery.

Although aphasia affects more than 367,000 people in the UK and aphasiology is a well-established multi-disciplinary research field, there is little public awareness of this condition, which can occur at any age.

The artworks in this exhibition, together with an excellent guide and video interviews with four of the artists, directly show us how we can find new means of communication, even when we are lost for words.

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Take that Descartes! “How the body shapes the mind”

By Rupert P Cole, on 5 September 2012

Here in Aberdeen, the British Science Festival kicked off with a fascinating series of talks on recent research into the way bodily experiences affect even our most abstract mental facilities and knowledge.

UCL’s own Gabriella Vigliocco, professor of psychology, organised the panel. Professor Vigliocco and three fellow professors in the field tackled the mind-body problem – one of the most notorious headaches of Western philosophy.

Mind over grey matter?
Stefano F. Cappa, professor of neurology at Milan’s San Raffaele Scientific Institute, gave the first of the talks. Professor Cappa introduced us to the key questions and experiments in cognitive neuroscience.

If we take for granted that the brain has something to do with the mind, then what is its relation? Alluding to Alan Turing’s computer analogy, Cappa asked is the brain “hardware”; the mind “software,” like a program? If so, how does the brain compute, or problem solve?

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Celebrating science outreach success

By news editor, on 28 August 2012

Written by Rebecca McKelvey, founder of in2scienceUK

Abrahim Ahmed

On Wednesday 22 August, the 2012 in2scienceUK cohort came together at Teachfirst’s offices in London Bridge to celebrate this year’s science placements.

The UCL-inspired scheme, now in its third year, brings together outstanding AS science students from the poorest schools in London with research scientists, for a summer placement where they can experience research science first hand. During the evening, everyone at the event found out more about why the programme exists.

Why do we need this scheme?
While just 7% of children in the UK attend private schools (Source: The Good Schools Guide), they represent 48% of those going to the most prestigious selective Universities. In comparison, just 2% of those on free school meals attend those universities, illustrating the huge distinction between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.

During the evening, we heard from Abrahim Ahmed from Leyton Sixth Form College, who was one of 68 students to have a placement this year. He said:“Carrying out  lab experiments at UCL with Dr Frances Edwards was a truly inspiring experience. I learned about the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients and how to carry out in vitro electrophysiology patch clamp recordings, which really cemented my interest in science. I cannot wait to go to university to study a bioscience degree”.

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