Making Memories

If you’ve ever watched the masterpiece ‘Taxi Driver’, directed by Martin Scorsese, you’ll certainly remember the famous monologue during which Travis Bickle speaks to himself in front of a mirror. But just what are you remembering? Your eyes and ears will have picked up on a number of speech features about the actor Robert DeNiro; his face, his voice. Emmanuel’s talk will explore the mysterious brain machinery behind how we understand speech, and the memories that follow.

There are nearly one million people with dementia and 700,000 unpaid carers across the UK. However, where we live, our ethnic background, our gender, how much we earn, and many other factors all impact our experiences of dementia care, leading to unmet needs and poor health and wellbeing outcomes. Clarissa will be talking about what dementia is, what health inequalities are, the combination of the two, and how the playing field can be levelled.

Our life expectancy has been increasing, and so too has that of our pets. Cats age in a similar way to humans, and age is the biggest risk factor for developing diseases such as cancer, dementia, diabetes and arthritis, which affect the quality of life of older people and older animals. At the Cat Prospective Ageing and Welfare Study (CatPAWS), Christine is following a group of middle aged cats as they grow old, examining the underlying mechanisms which cause the ageing process and whether they could be targeted to improve healthy ageing in our cats, and perhaps in us as well...