Saturday, February 14, 2015

Neuroscience

The British Neuroscience Association (BNA) is teaming up with the Edinburgh International Science Festival for its annual conference this April. The BNA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its origins as a small discussion group meeting monthly upstairs in a London pub. The Science Festival is just half as old. The very term neuroscience was unfamiliar half a century ago—it had been coined in the early 1960s by a far-seeing Massachusetts Institute of Technology biophysicist, Francis Schmitt. Schmitt had raised the funds to publish an irregular bulletin packed with provocative thoughts on everything from synaptic function to artificial intelligence, and more importantly, to support a month long summer school for budding neuroscientists at Boulder, Colorado, USA, to which my then boss, penicillin Nobel Laureate Ernst Chain, duly dispatched me. In the 1960s, most researchers on the brain still spoke of themselves by their primary discipline, as neuroanatomists, neurochemists, neuropharmacologists. Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program (NRP) was intended to bridge and hopefully integrate these many disciplines studying brain and behaviour. Interdisciplinarity was to be its means and bridging theories to connect the many levels at which the brain could be studied its goal.

1 comment:

  1. Cleveland's daVinci

    The first time I placed an image of mine in a public area, within a day a vandal had pried it loose. Prior to my first art shows opening, the gallery's owner chose then to curate my work. When I finally participated in announce scored, injuries exhibition, my fellow artists complained about how 'the tone & tenor'.
    My ideal show, replete with environment is intended to release a careful subscribed cocktail of chemicals released in the viewers brain. A 152 I.Q. As a fetish photographer, creates many possibilities. This then, mine.
    Are my life choices so grave, that you'll forever deny me my due?

    -Marc Breed

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