29th July 2011 Ottawa, Canada
Official opening of the Centre for Brain and Mind: Post 1 of 2
This is the SIN intern Lara Kaute sharing her impressions of the official opening of the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario in London. Read on for an overview of the Centre, the work that goes on there and the staff.
On Monday July 25th, John and I attended the official opening of the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario in London. We listened to a few speeches, and then visited the university’s facilities. Students there were pretty good at passing on their enthusiasm. One of them confronted us with two blocks that looked as if they were made out of the same material, but one was twice as big as the other. We had to lift them and say which one felt heavier. In our hands, the little one definitely seemed to be heavier, but when we put both blocks on a scale it turned out that they weighed the same! However, if we lifted the blocks again, the little one would continue feeling heavier than the bigger one! The explanation for this is that the brain expects the little block to be lighter than the large one, and as these expectations do not fit with what the subject actually feels while lifting these two blocks, the brain overcompensates the feeling of how heavy the smaller block actually is. The name of this experiment is the size-weight illusion, and its purpose is to investigate perception, i.e. how what you see acts on your brain. I found it fascinating!
One of the other things we saw was the university’s great new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) facility (see picture):
I was pleased to see how scientific research is honoured in this place and how it is enabled to build up great international programs, so as to find how to fight against brain diseases, to keep an emotional contact with people affected by this kind of illnesses, to better understand the reasons for mental diseases… all very useful things!
I got the chance to meet and to chat with some high-level British and Canadian scientists, and they gave me the nice impression of being very open-minded, interesting and joyful people, scientifically very competent as well as being aware of international relations.
This trip to London was a great experience!