Making Your Mind Up

We all know what maps look like, but what do the maps our brain create look like and how do we use them? The talk will touch on how we use our brain to remember, navigating and imagining space. In this discussion the audience learn about the importance of studying desert ants, fruit bats, and the most curious creature - the London taxi driver. Follow @hugospiers #pint15

If you look up just about any word in a dictionary you will usually see a pretty long list of possible definitions. And yet in everyday life it takes no apparent effort to figure out that. Jennifer will talk about how people are able to make rapid ‘best guesses’ about which meaning the speaker intended to use by using a wide range of different sources of information, and about the brain regions that are involved in this important aspect of communication.

Although silicon chips and neurons compute in very different ways, machine systems and people tackle certain decision problems, such as predicting the winner of a sport’s contest, in a similar fashion. The chief difference is that people rely on a smaller number of memories when making decisions and can be more clever in how they construe situations. Follow @DrLoveBC #pint15