Brains Behaving Badly: From Wandering Minds to Toxic Tangles

"Take any everyday action you repeat over and over—typing, tapping, pressing a button. Even when nothing seems to change, your performance never stays exactly the same.

Intuitively, we explain this by blaming our attention: “I was slow because my mind was wandering.” But is fluctuating performance really just a sign that our attention slips in and out?

In this talk, I’ll draw on studies of brain waves, differences between people, and even dart throwing, I’ll show how and why our performance varies from moment to moment—even when we’re doing the same simple action again and again."

"When we think of Alzheimer’s disease, we often hear about the brain slowly shutting down. But what’s actually happening on a microscopic level? Deep inside our brain cells, a protein called ""Tau"" gets twisted into toxic tangles, choking the cell from the inside out. For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out how to stop these tangles from forming. But what about the people who already have them?

In this talk, I will take you inside the brain's own microscopic recycling centers. Discover how scientists in Cambridge are growing living human brain cells in a dish, making them glow in the dark to watch these tangles form in real-time, and using AI to hunt for new drugs. The goal? Not just to pause Alzheimer's, but to find a pill that acts like molecular scissors, cutting up the tangles and making sick brain cells healthy again."

Alzheimer’s disease affects almost 1 in 10 people over 65, with many more family members and carers also affected. But what is happening inside the brain to drive this devastating condition? Join researchers Matthew Reid and Laura Li Yu as they explore how proteins go wrong, clump together, and spread through the brain - and how recreating this process in the lab can help us find new treatments.