Beautiful Brains

We often talk about memory as if it were a single thing, but there are many types of memory and one in particular (episodic memory) seems very special. The talk will discuss what episodic memory is and what it is not. Memories for past events in your life might not be as reliable as you think, but the ability to remember these events also seems to be crucial for imagining events in our future. As a result, people with amnesia don’t just forget – they seem stuck in the present.

The study of learning has a long history in psychology. Pavlov gave his name to what would be known as conditioning, but the same ideas have been around since Aristotle’s time, and the 17th and 18th Centuries the British Associationists, such as Locke and Hume, put forward similar philosophical positions. In this talk I’ll discuss the evidence from animals and humans for how Pavlovian learning processes influence how our bodies respond to stimuli in the world that signal important events, including why you may get more drunk than expected tonight, and how you might find your way home again.

Have you ever really thought about the brain’s role in walking? It seems automatic for most of us, but putting one step in front of the other actually requires complex cognitive processes. In this talk, we will take a tour of how we look at tiny discrete details of walking in the lab and the home, explore the emerging relationship between walking and cognition and discuss how useful walking might be for the prediction and diagnosis of dementia.