Your Amazing Brain Lectures at Discover Bucks Museum

Living Magazines Your Amazing Brain

Ever wondered what your brain looks like in pictures, or how it changes over time? Want to know how your brain makes decisions or find out how our brains have evolved?

Discover the answers to all these questions plus much more in 6 lectures from scientists at the University of Oxford. These lectures form part of the events programme for new exhibition Your Amazing Brain: a users guide. The lectures will take place on Saturdays at 2pm at Discover Bucks Museum with the first one taking place on 21 January 2023. Lectures are free but please book in advance as places limited.

Lecture 1: Your Brain in Pictures: from MRI to microscopes

21 January at 2pm, with Professor Stuart Clare

The human brain is a fascinatingly complex network of cells, that sits on the shoulders of each one of us. In this talk, you’ll go on a picture journey of how scientists see the brain and the tools they use to peer inside. You’ll learn how MRI scanners give us exquisite detail not only of what the brain looks like, but also what it is doing and how all those cells are connected. Then, to get an even closer view, how a range of microscopes can show us a close-up of cell networks and even inside individual brain cells.

Lecture 2: Your Ever-Changing Brain

Saturday 4 February at 2pm, with Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg

Our brains are changing all the time. They change when we learn something new, as we get older, or following damage such as stroke. Changes in our lifestyle, like taking up exercise or altering our sleep patterns, can also change our brains. Understanding how the brain adapts to change can help us to design new rehabilitation treatments, to promote healthy ageing, or to enhance learning. This talk will discuss how brain scanning technology is used to investigate how the brain changes with experience, learning and recovery from damage. Such investigations shed light on the possibilities and limits for changing the brain and help inform design of novel clinical treatments and diagnostics for brain disorders.

Lecture 3: Your Decisive Brain: How does your brain make decisions?

Saturday 11 February at 2pm, with Professor Mark Walton

Lecture 4: Your Evolving Brain

Saturday 18 February at 2pm, with Professor Rogier Mars

Lecture 5: Your Evolving Brain

Saturday 25 February at 2pm, with Professor Sana Suri

Lecture 6: Depression and Anxiety

TBC March at 2pm, with Professor Angharad de Cates

Each lecture is a standalone so you do not need to see the one before for the next one to make sense and you can go to as many as you like. The lectures are FREE and suitable for 11 years plus and last roughly an hour. Places are limited so book your places today to avoid disappointment at discoverbucksmuseum.org.

These lectures form part of the events programme for the exhibition Your Amazing Brain: a users guide, which was first created for Banbury Museum & Gallery in collaboration with the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford and funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Your Amazing Brain lectures will take place on 21 January at 2pm, 4 February at 2pm, 11 February at 2pm, 18 February at 2pm, 25 February at 2pm at Discover Bucks Museum, Aylesbury. The final lecture will take place in March, date tbc.

Your Amazing Brain exhibition is on now and runs until Saturday 15 April 2023.

For more information, opening times and ticket prices visit discoverbucksmuseum.org
Discover Bucks Museum, Church Street, Aylesbury HP20 2QP