Think about Thinking

Sam, based at the Division of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, heads one of many teams researching the causes of dementia and looking for ways to prevent, alleviate or cure the disease.  

He spoke about his particular area of research into electrical impulses and circuitry within the brain and how we perceive the world by integrating information from all of our senses. How the brain manages to achieve this is unclear. He gave an informal seminar talk on the way in which neural circuits in the brain process and integrate multiple streams of sensory information. Specifically, how auditory and visual signals may be fused. In the talk he presented real data collected with novel imaging technologies and touched on the role of specialized ‘hub’ neurons in the processing of sensory information. Finally, he gave a brief overview of the current thinking in the field of dementia research and alluded to possible future directions.

President Linda Fearn, incidentally Sam’s mother-in-law, thanked Sam for the enlightening talk and presented him with a donation towards dementia research.