In November 2017 the Adaptive Brain Lab went on the road to learn from field-leaders and teach some sixth-formers about Cognitive Neuroscience.
Future-proofing Healthcare
On Thursday 2 November Lizzie, Elisa and Kathy went to London to attend a non-promotional Future-proofing Healthcare: NeuroSense eveningevent hosted by Roche. The trio heard from influential academics and members of the Neuroscience community from across the UK. They heard about ground-breaking research in the clinical and non-clinical arena, and learned the fascinating story about how an innovative watch has been developed to help with the treatment of Parkinson’s disease as part of Microsoft’s Project Emma.
Generation neXt
A week later, on Friday 10 November, Lizzie and Kathy went south again, this time visiting Roche’s headquarters to participate in their GeneratioNext event, where they helped 120 sixth-form students to explore the cognitive psychology behind why you Don’t believe everything you see. This workshop used optical illusions, tablet-based games and a model brain stimulator to help the students to think about how the brain uses the visual cues it detects to make predictions about depth based on visual information alone - in other words, how the brain acts as an extremely fast detective to use the two-dimensional image received in the eye to guess whether something is in fact three-dimensional (and why your brain gets it wrong sometimes!). More broadly, the event aimed to highlight the diverse academic backgrounds of the Neuroscientists of today, helping the students think about the different types of career you can have in ‘science’.
Hear from the students themselves here.
Building on the topics raised during these workshops, Lizzie also presented to the staff at Roche on Extracting the structure of the world around us: Lifelong Learning and brain plasticity, which prompted some really interesting discussions and ideas for further research.
This event was the Adaptive Brain Lab’s first pupil-targeted trip outside of Cambridge, and we’re delighted that it was such a success.
We would like to thank Roche for inviting the lab to both of these illuminating events, and look forward to more in the future!