Nansen Neuroscience Lectures 2012

Nansen Neuroscience Lectures arrangeres på Fridtjof Nansens fødelsdag 10. oktober til minne om Nansens viktige bidrag til nevrovitenskapen. To foredragsholdere vil snakke om nevrovitenskapelige tema: 

Bilde

A. David Smith: 

"Slowing progression in Alzheimer's disease by lowering homocysteine - evidence from neuroimaging".

Expansion (red/yellow) or contraction (blue/light blue) of the brain. (A) participant in the placebo group, baseline tHcy 22 µmol/L, increased by 8 µmol/L over two years. Atrophy rate 2.50% per year. (B) participant in active treatment group, baseline tHcy 24 µmol/L , decreased by 12 µmol/L over two years. Atrophy rate 0.46% per year.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) progresses from an asymptomatic stage, through mild cognitive impairment (MCI), to eventual dementia. One therapeutic approach is to modify risk factors in the early stages. Raised plasma total homocysteine is a risk factor for AD and can be lowered by B vitamins (folate, vitamins B12 and B6). In the 2-year VITACOG trial we found that B vitamins slowed cognitive and clinical decline in those with MCI who had high baseline homocysteine. The B vitamins also markedly slowed atrophy in those regions of the brain that show loss of tissue in AD.

Semir Zeki:

"The neurobiology of beauty".

Toward A Brain-Based Theory of Beauty: Overlap in zones within the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC) activated by visually beautiful (red), musically beautiful (green) stimuli, and the overlap between the two activations (yellow)

The lecture will be a neurobiological dissection of one of the most famous definitions of beauty, given by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757): "Beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses". I will examine, in light of experimental evidence, the four pillars of this definition: the abstract nature of beauty (as is implied in the definition), the human mind in the experience of beauty, the quality in bodies (that arouse the sense of beauty) and the neural nature of the intervention by the senses.

Tredje gang Nansen Neuroscience Lectures avholdes

Nansen Neuroscience Lectures ble arrangert for første gang 10. oktober 2010. I jubileumsåret 2011 da 150-årsdagen for Fridtjof Nansens fødsel ble feiret, ble Nansen Neuroscience Lectures erstattet med Fridtjof Nansen Science Symposium - der nevrovitenskap inngikk som en del - 28. april. I år arrangeres Nansen Neuroscience Lectures igjen på Nansens fødselsdag.  

Nansen Neuroscience Lectures arrangeres av Linda H Bergersen og Jon Storm-Mathisen i samarbeid med Centre for Molecular Biology and Neuroscience (CMBN) ved Universitetet i Oslo, Nansen Neuroscience Network (NNN) og Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi.

Mer om foredragsholderne:

A. David Smith, FMedSci
Professor emeritus of Pharmacology
University of Oxford
Founding Director of Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing (OPTIMA)
http://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/optima
Hon. Assoc. Director MRC Anatomical Neuropharmacology Unit 
http://www.mrc.ox.ac.uk/

S. Zeki, FRS, FMedSci
Professor of Neuroesthetics
(having previously held the Chair of Neurobiology)
University College London
http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/
http://profzeki.blogspot.com/