Brain Day 2012 will be held on Saturday 17 March

This year the theme for Auckland Brain Day 2012 is ‘brain fitness’. An exciting range of free lectures, discussions and workshops are planned to keep your brain in top condition!

Auckland Brain Day will be held on Saturday 17th March, and will feature neuroscientists and clinicians from the Centre for Brain Research talking about the latest research updates. The event is organised in association with the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand. Held at the Auckland Business School in Grafton, it is the biggest event of its kind in New Zealand!

International neuroscience experts will bring you up to date with the latest information on topical brain issues. Discussions with community experts provide the opportunity to discover practical tips on living with brain disorders. Meanwhile interactive workshops and hands-on demonstrations will open your eyes to the wonders of the brain.

Brain Day offers something for all ages. We aim to provide information on the myriad of brain disorders affecting people throughout the lifespan. Brain health is important too, so come along to find out how to keep your best asset working to its optimum ability!

Information on the free event, venue and facilities, along with the full schedule for the day can be found here.

To get a taster for the day, why not take a look at all the events last year?

Day: Saturday 17th March 2012
Time: 9am – 4pm
Venue: Auckland Business School, 12 Grafton Road, Auckland
Cost: Free
Facilities: $5 parking under the building, easily accessible and cafes on site

Lecture recordings

We have free recordings of the informative lectures given by expert scientists and clinicians in 2011. You can view these lectures on the web.

We will also be recording lectures in 2012, and these will be posted on our website in April.

Russell Brown will MC the Mind Reading event on March 14th 2012

 Media commentator Russell Brown has been confirmed as the host for our Mind Reading event in Brain Awareness Week. Russell is the host of Media 7 on TVNZ7 and the owner of the Public Address community of blogs.

 Russell has a keen interest in brain research and will bring a journalist’s questioning eye to the proceedings on the night. He says he is very keen to watch the live analysis in action, aiming to find out if our scientists can tell a lie from a memory.

Russell is one of New Zealand’s most prolific independent journalists. He has been writing about technology and media for The Listener since 1993 and has picked up a variety of awards there and at Unlimited magazine and Computerworld, where he was the country’s first online news editor.

In 2007 he received the inaugural Qantas Media Award for blogging, for his long-running blog Hard News. He is also on the boards of the New Zealand Sound Archives and NZOnscreen, and is the co-founder of Kiwi Foo Camp.

Russell currently writes the blog Hard News and is a keen Twitter user. You can catch him at the handle @publicaddress along with our scientists at @TeamMRI.

MRI expert Associate Professor Brett Cowan describes the event in this video on Facebook.

Brett will reveal the magic of MRI in our Mind Reading event

Brett is an expert in medical engineering and will reveal the magic of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and its ability to see inside people in our Mind Reading event. With a medical and engineering background, he will explain how MRI uses superconductivity, with temperature and pressures from outer space, and magnetic fields strong enough attract metal objects so strongly that they can’t be pulled out of the machine.

Associate Professor Cowan is an Auckland Mechanical Engineering graduate who specialised in aeronautics. After running the wind tunnel at the engineering school he studied philosophical theology and ancient history before completing his medical training. He was placed first in his class in both Mechanical Engineering and Medicine winning over 30 academic prizes. He then worked as a physician in emergency medicine at North Shore Hospital for ten years.

Brett is now the director of the Centre for Advanced MRI at the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, where he performs research with MRI to image hearts along with clinical trials of new treatments for old diseases. The Centre for Advanced MRI has two MRI scanners including the Siemens Skyra our Team MRI will be using for ‘Mind Reading’. They provide not only research facilities to the University of Auckland, but also scans for children born with heart defects and many other patients with complex medical problems from Auckland and throughout New Zealand.

He would always rather be motor racing.

Laura will run the control room for our Mind Reading experiment!

Laura is the Communications and Liaison Manager for the Centre for Brain Research. She is a literate science geek (unusual?!) and loves letting people in to the secrets of brain science. Her career has been focused around science communication and organizing exciting public science events. Mind Reading will be a first for New Zealand and Laura is very excited about this!

Laura trained as a science journalist at City University in the UK, and then worked as a journalist for the BBC and other stations for six years. Reporting in local news gave her a good grounding in different audiences, covering everything from murders and crime, to a dog in a bridesmaid’s dress! She then worked in production for BBC Countryfile, a rural current affairs programme that took her all over the UK.

Laura has a First Class Honours degree in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Manchester and is currently undertaking an MSc in Speech Science. She moved to New Zealand three years ago, and has maintained her interest in science communication with links to the Science Communicators Association of New Zealand and the Association of British Science Writers. She is also a freelance magazine writer, and writes and edits the Auckland Huntington’s disease newsletter as well as the CBR Connections magazine.

Always keen to introduce new audiences to the wonders of the brain, Laura is hoping this event will leave us all with a sense of awe for the powers of the brain. As a keen science fiction fan, she’s very interested to find out if our scientists really can tell the difference between a lie and a memory… a brave new world?!

Reece is the willing guinea pig for our Mind Reading experiment!

Reece is a psychology PhD student in the Centre for Brain Research. He is studying visual cognition, or how we process what we see. In particular, his research interests centre on visual attention, visual short-term memory and the “binding problem”, which is the problem of explaining how the brain binds information about different visual features (colour, shape, orientation etc) into an integrated representation of the world.

He grew up in South Africa and has lived in Auckland for the last 15 years. He completed his high school education at Marcellin College in Royal Oak and then did a BSc in psychology and pharmacology at the University of Auckland.

Reece’s interest in brain imaging stems from an ongoing debate about the relationship between psychological and neural explanations for how humans behave. That is, should we explain intelligent human behaviour in terms of memory, attention, beliefs and desires, or in terms of action potentials, neurons and hippocampi? Or is there some way to bridge these two forms of explanation? He thinks that whatever the answer is to these fascinating questions, neuroimaging is going to play an important role in helping us understand these issues.

Reece will be the brain scanning participant in the Mind Reading event, and will be the guinea pig going into the Siemens fMRI scanner at the Centre for Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging. He can’t wait to see if the neuroscientists involved are able to distinguish between his memories and imaginings based purely on his brain activity!

Here Dr Donna Rose Addis explains her research showing how memory is used to imagine future events. You can listen to her speaking on Radio NZ Summer Nights, or view a video on Facebook.

Donna Rose will be leading the MRI analysis for the live Mind Reading event

Over the next few days we will be introducing the Mind Reading team who will be bringing you the exciting live MRI event in March for Brain Awareness Week.

First up is Dr Donna Rose Addis

Donna Rose is an up and coming young researcher, who studies memory and imagination. Her work is exciting much interest, and she was recently awarded both the prestigious Rutherford Discovery Fellowship and the 2010 Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize.

Donna Rose is a cognitive neuroscientist in the Centre for Brain Research, where she is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology. She leads the Memory Lab team, and uses neuropsychological and neuroimaging techniques to understand how we remember our pasts and imagine our futures, and how these abilities change with age, Alzheimer’s disease and depression.

Dr Addis grew up in Mangere East, Auckland. She was the dux of Aorere College and New Zealand’s Top All-Round Scholar of Pacific Island Descent in 1995. She completed her BA and MA in Psychology at The University of Auckland. She then undertook a PhD as a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Toronto, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She returned to New Zealand in 2008.

Donna Rose will be leading the MRI analysis for the Mind Reading event, trying to use this exciting technology to work out if she can tell the difference between imagination and memory. Of course imagination is a nice word for lying… and so we’ll also be testing the lie detection powers of MRI!

Mind reading is the ultimate superhero skill – beyond the realms of human possibility. Yet new technology is bringing this futuristic scenario within our grasp.

We are proud to announce this exciting event, planned for Brain Awareness Week in March, to uncover the science of brain imaging! Join us as top scientists Associate Professor Brett Cowan and Dr Donna Rose Addis from The University of Auckland showcase the incredible technology of MRI and provide a behind the scenes glimpse of cutting-edge brain research.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allows scientists to see brain areas ‘light up’ as we think. Movements, emotions, memories and intentions have all been visualised, enabling scientists to see inside a person’s mind, and possibly predict the future. Yet how much is science, and how much is fiction?

In this public event we will explore the inner workings of the brain, delving into the origins of memories and learning more about our identity as human beings. Featuring live analysis of a brain scan, ‘Mind Reading?’ is a first for New Zealand.

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Wednesday 14th March

Time: 6:45pm – 8:30pm
Where: Auckland Museum, The Auckland Domain, Parnell
Cost: $10 (plus $3 booking fee) Tickets may be purchased on the door, or by phoning 09 306 7048.

Hosted by the Centre for Brain Research and Centre for Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and with thanks to our sponsors Siemens, Auckland Museum Institute and the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Standard medications are not affective in approximately a third of people with schizophrenia, and these patients are considered ‘treatment-resistant’. Alternative medication and combinations of antipsychotics must be used, but these medications have a greater risk of inducing serious side effects and therefore are avoided where possible. Consequently, people with treatment-resistant schizophrenia often experience many years of unsuccessful therapy with standard medications before alternatives are prescribed, during which time their symptoms severely affect daily living and have a significant impact on long-term outcomes.

 The Psychopharmacology team will now investigate whether they can identify measurable biological characteristics (biomarkers) that could be used to predict whether people with schizophrenia will be treatment-resistant. Brain magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, and neuropsychological data will be collected and analysed to investigate the structure and function of the brain in people with schizophrenia who are treatment-resistant, and the findings compared to people with schizophrenia who respond well to standard medications and normal subjects.

 Identification of reliable biomarkers to predict treatment-resistant schizophrenia would enable alternative medications to be prescribed earlier in the disease course. This will ultimately minimise the time that these patients experience debilitating symptoms, leading to improved outcomes for them, and reducing the burden on their families and health care providers.

 The Auckland Medical Research Foundation has also funded two new PhD scholarships at the Centre for Brain Research. Foundation Executive Director Kim McWilliams says: “Many of these researchers already have and will go on to become leaders and internationally recognised in their particular discipline or field of medicine.”

 Projects:

Biomarkers for treatment resistant schizophrenia ($179,267 – two years)
Dr Valerie Anderson, Psychopharmacology and Neurodynamics
  
Preterm stem cell therapy (Doctoral Scholarship $122,000 – three years)
Miss Lotte van den Heuij, Fetal Physiology

Visual brain plasticity in adult humans (Doctoral Scholarship $122,000 – three years)
Mr Victor Borges, Visual Neuroscience Group