Blog | Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Exploring individual variability in cognitive behaviour

Have you ever wondered how your brain adapts to different situations, such as driving on the left or right side of the road depending on the country you are in? Do our brains solve these context-dependent tasks in the same way or is there individual variability? Dr Marino Pagan recently gave a seminar at SWC on his work uncovering the neural sources of individual variability in cognitive behaviour. Read the Q&A.

27 November 2023

Illustration of Stephen Reicher and text from his talk

Understanding crowd behaviour: have we learned from Covid-19?

“One of the most stupid debates in psychology, is the nature-nurture debate,” Professor Stephen Reicher said as he opened the 2023 SWC Lecture. In this Q&A, he details what first sparked his interest in crowd behaviour and his experiences from the Bristol riots in 1980 through to the Covid-19 pandemic. He touches on the importance of leaders and the implications of his research for society.

22 November 2023

Public Engagement

From scratch to dispatch: growing an accessible neuroscience programme for adolescents

Built upon the principles of increasing accessibility, excitement, and career prospects in science for adolescent students from the Greater London area, the Neuronauts programme kicked off its second year in electric fashion.

9 November 2023

11 memory tips from leading neuroscientists

Many of us wish we had better memories. And so, we asked leading neuroscientists who visited SWC to share their favourite memory tips. Here’s what they had to say.

5 November 2023

Solving problems through replay in the brain

In a new paper published in Cell, Behrens and colleagues at University of Oxford, UCL, Beijing Normal University and DeepMind, explored how the brain reuses building blocks to understand the world. They found that generative replay in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex underpins such compositional computations.

31 October 2023

Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series 2023-24 winners announced

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2023-24 Sainsbury Wellcome Centre Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series (ENSS). ENSS is a prestigious competition that invites aspiring leaders in neuroscience to present their research to the neuroscience community in London.

23 October 2023

SWC and GCNU PhD students at the Annual Student Symposium

Keeping track of time and numbers: Brains versus machines

Time can sometimes appear fast or slow depending on the context, but we know that we’re capable of keeping track of how much time has elapsed. How our brains achieve this was one of the key topics chosen by this year’s SWC/GCNU student committee for the Annual Student Symposium.

20 October 2023

6 reasons why your brain needs sleep

As we look ahead to a new sleep lab opening at SWC in January 2024, we asked leading neuroscientists their thoughts on why we sleep. Here are six key reasons they shared.

27 September 2023

Peeking inside the black box with recurrent neural networks

How do we extract essential features from the activity of billions of neurons in the brain? In a SWC Seminar, Dr. Kanaka Rajan shared her work using recurrent neural networks constrained directly by experimental recordings, a special class of artificial neural network models, to figure out how real brains learn.

26 September 2023

Three brain hats

Engaging with teachers to nurture the next generation of neuroscientists

How do I know if my students are already using ChatGPT? Can we differentiate between AI and student responses? Could AI be a useful teaching tool in science? These were some of the most common questions teachers submitted ahead of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre’s very first event for educators.

7 September 2023

Celebrating another chapter of sustainability at SWC

Following on from 2021 and 2022, SWC has received a third Gold award as part of the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF). We look back on our sustainability efforts, big and small, over the years and look ahead to more initiatives to come.

Cross-area coupling and consolidation during sleep

How do brain areas talk to each other during sleep to enable us to wake up one morning and realise we’ve gotten better at a new motor skill like biking or skiing? In a SWC Seminar, Dr Karunesh Ganguly discussed his work uncovering a dialogue between cortical and subcortical areas leading to memory consolidation during skill learning.