Our next Dear Neuroscience event is themed around our senses of touch and proprioception, or our ability to sense our body parts are without actively looking at them - for instance, can you clap your hands with your eyes closed? For this event, we are excited to be working closely with physiologists, neurologists, and performance artists, largely enabled by a fantastic collaboration with the National Centre for Circus Arts. Other collaborators include NeuroGEARS and researchers from the MA Art and Science course at University Arts London.
This event will be held on Friday, 24 May 2019, from noon to 5pm at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. We want to explore questions from YOU about our abilities to not only move, touch, and feel the world around us, but also to sense our own body’s movement and position in the world.
To register for a ticket, please visit the Eventbrite page.
If you would like to submit a question, inspired by something in your daily life, that makes you wonder about the brain and our senses of touch and proprioception, please submit your question(s) via this form.
This event will be a festival-style gathering, with performances, interactive installations, small-group discussions, games, workshops, and more! Feel free to drop in for one or two activities or stay for the whole 5 hours - a detailed schedule will be posted here soon. School groups and families are more than welcome!
What is “Dear Neuroscience”?
“Dear Neuroscience” is an event series that explores new ways of conducting neuroscience research by bringing together scientists, artists, teachers, clinicians, parents, and children to co-create sensory explorations of neural phenomena “in the wild”. We want to ask our audience, “What’s something in your daily life that makes you wonder about brains? What are your burning questions for neuroscience? What experiences have you had in the ‘real world’ that you hope neuroscientists are studying?”
We believe that neuroscience research can learn a lot from projects that involve our audience at all stages of the research process: picking the questions to study, designing the study setup, running the experiment, analysing the results, and discussing our conclusions. Changing our tactics as a neuroscience community in this way allows us to harness the many direct and personal experiences with brains that every living person has while trying to navigate a complex and highly interconnected society. This intuition for how brains work “in the real world” is an enormously valuable perspective that is difficult to access in a traditional neuroscience laboratory.
We hope to access this “beyond the lab” perspective through the Dear Neuroscience events. A fundamental goal of each event is to generate a list of testable hypotheses which can guide or expand existing research projects, or motivate new research programmes based on well-documented interest and/or robust anecdotal evidence. We also hope to connect potential collaborators who are looking for a community of researchers eager to engage in broad topics of study that require expertise from a variety of disciplines.
To learn more, please visit the Dear Neuroscience website.