January 18, 2012
Lost Lectures: Jelly Brain
Our first Jelly Brain of 2012! The wonderful Dr Zarinah Agnew of University College London will dissect panacotta and raspberry swirls set in the shape of our marvelous cerebrums as part of the brand new series, The Lost Lectures.
Full details of the night here.
September 20, 2011
Dirty Brains
Neuroscientist Dr Zarinah Agnew came to the Secret Garden Party this summer to teach us about the coital corners of the cortex in her new lecture, Dirty Brains. Here, she gives us the goods on how neuroscientists have probed our privates.
Trying to make science sound interesting whilst balanced and educational is somewhat of a challenge, but one that I consider to be a central part of being a scientist. I have been working with Guerilla Science for the last few years; we have done a number of events, festivals and parties and it’s been a pretty good ride. This year the theme from their funders the Wellcome Trust is “Dirt” and given that my (very general) theme is brains, I put in a proposal to talk about Dirty Brains: mapping out how the erogenous zones arerepresented in the brain.
Zarinah, introducing us to the "dirty" bits of the brain at the Dirt Banquet at the Secret Garden Party this summer.
The idea stemmed from a couple of lectures I saw at a conference in the US a few years ago: in light of the fact that most of what we know about genitals in the brain has been drawn from studies of men, researchers had decided to instead go to great lengths to map out the female genitals in the brain using real women. Of course my talk (done in conjunction with Dr Aidan Horner of UCL) was accompanied by a fairly long and drawn out description of what these experiments entailed: “mechanical self stimulators” and so forth.
September 17, 2010
The Sensecam & The Secret Garden Party
We follow neuroscientist Adrian Owen’s gadabouts through the Secret Garden Party in July 2010 – from raves to our secret island hideaway to – with a handy Sensecam, a nifty device that takes a photograph every few seconds to create a continuous record of all his experiences.
“Almost everything you experience is laid down in your brain, somewhere, but for the most part we can’t access it,” he explains. The most interesting part about the Sensecam record, he believes, is what it teaches us about human memory: only the things we might want to remember are actually made available for easy access. “And this shows us how important social interactions are for constructing memories… a large component of ‘memory’ is what you were thinking or feeling at the time you experienced these events.”
September 2, 2010
A Tasty Brain
Carefully carving through the surface of the shiny, quivering pink cortex with his scalpel, neuroscientist Guy Billings traced out a small area of the marvellous human cerebrum. “This,” he said, “is Broca’s area – crucial for the ability to produce language. People who have suffered damage to this region have lost the ability to speak.” The crowd peered in for a closer look.
“Let’s just cut that out then,” said Guy, and plopping the pink shiny piece onto a plate, he handed it out with a shiny pink spoon. It was instantly devoured (and declared delicious).
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