The Brain: A User's Manual

 

Called to Question

presents

The Brain: A User’s Manual

with return guest speaker

Stephen Brown, Ph.D.

(Stephen is a professor of Psychology at Red Deer Polytechnic. He completed his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience in 2015 at Leiden University (The Netherlands). His dissertation focused on the role of the locus coeruleus, a small brainstem nucleus, and noradrenaline (a signalling chemical in the brain) in attention and learning.)

“Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity,” said the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran. 

Our brain consists of about 86 billion neurons and 87 billion glial cells; astronomers have estimated the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy to be about 100 billion, so we carry a comparable number of nerve cells in our heads. In this meeting, I’ll give an overview of the human brain and its parts, after which we will discuss some neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s and what they have taught us about human cognition.  This is an opportunity to ask anything you ever wanted to know about the brain but were too afraid to ask.

Date and Time:

Saturday, April 23rd, 2022 at 7pm