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Mapping the Mind

By Frances-Catherine Quevenco, on 14 June 2011

Optical illusion

Can a person’s neuroanatomy tell them about who they are? This was one of the most intriguing questions asked at a talk with Prof. Robert Turner, director of Neurophysics at the Max-Planck Institute, and Geraint Rees, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL.

Unlike the other talks I had been to, I had decided to bring two guests sans science-background along for the ride, hoping that after the lecture they too would share my enthusiasm for neuroscience. Professor Robert Turner began with an introduction to the realm of neuroscience, covering the birth of phrenology by Franz Joseph Gall to Maguire’s study on increased hippocampi in taxi drivers in 2000. Geraint Rees then proceeded to address the question of whether an individual’s brain structure played a role in determining how they saw the world. Rees pointed out that in fact the visual cortices of different individuals differ two- or three-fold, so does this affect how we see?

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