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The ability of the human brain to make and store memories allows us to learn, to form relationships and to shape our individual identities! But how do we do it? This event will discuss current research into the memory systems of the brain, exploring how they work and what happens when they are damaged.
Losing memories: why does dementia make us forget?
Dr. Sarah Ryan
(Alzheimer's Society Junior Fellow, The University of Manchester)
Dr Sarah Ryan is an Alzheimer’s Society Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. In this talk, she will explain how Alzheimer’s disease damages the part of the brain responsible for forming new memories, and retrieving and organising old ones. Come along to find out more about how dementia impacts memory, why not all types of memories are affected the same way, and what ancient Greek seahorses have to do with the human brain.
How the Brain’s Memory Systems Process Space
Rowan Lawrence
(Graduate Teaching Assistant/PhD Student (Cognitive Neuroscience), The University of Manchester)
The medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus and neighbouring cortex, are essential for encoding and retrieving rich episodic memories formed throughout our lives. Neuroscience and neuroimaging research has revealed that these structures also process and understand space, from responding to specific places and mapping the local environment to tracking locations of objects and signalling speed and direction of movement through the world. This talk will be a tour of the modern neuroscience investigating these functions and how they are driving understanding of memory function and decline.
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