Have you ever struggled to find the right word? Perhaps it was on the tip of your tongue, or your mind went blank altogether. This momentary lapse highlights a process known as ‘lexical access’ – the brain’s mechanism for retrieving words. SWC Seminar speaker Professor Michael A. Long is striving to understand how this process works. In his lab at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Long studies a type of parrot called budgerigars. But what can parrots really teach us about human communication?

You never forget how to ride a bike. But how does the brain store these kinds of memories? And how do new skills not overwrite older ones? These questions are driving the work of Dr Nuo Li, Associate Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. In this Q&A, Li talks about his work and its implications for understanding how we learn new skills, and his hopes for helping people with movement disorders.