Lund University opens research programmes within brain research

“Two areas in particular stand out among the scientific challenges of the twenty-first century: understanding the universe and understanding how the human brain functions. And both are dizzying and endless”, says Anders Björklund, professor of neurobiology at Lund University.

Lund University’s three strategic research programmes within brain research – diseases of the nervous system, nano-neuroscience, and thinking, learning and cognition – gather researchers from many different faculties in creative research environments.

The idea behind the Science Week on The Amazing brain from 4 to 10 September is to showcase this breadth. A number of top international researchers, including Norwegian Nobel Prize laureate Edvard Moser, have been invited to speak at the main event, The Amazing Brain symposium in Lund City Hall on 6 September, to be held in English and to be live-streamed on the webpage for this event at lu.se.

“We want to reach an interested general public that finds the brain exciting. So we have chosen researchers who are good at bringing the subject to life in a rich and stimulating way”, says Anders Björklund.

With outstanding researchers such as Robert Zatorre from Canada, Dorothy Bishop from the UK and Stanislas Dahaene from France on the programme, many exciting talks are expected about the human brain’s function, from how we perceive music to how we learn languages and process numbers and letters.

Miguel Nicolelis from the USA will show us how, using our brain, we can control a robot arm, for example, while Antonia Hamilton from the UK will take an interesting deep dive into the teenage brain. The latter theme is a good fit with upper secondary school pupils being an important target group for Science Week.

“We are keen to elicit interest in young people so that they will choose to specialise in brain subjects later on. The brain as an object of study touches on all aspects of life, after all, from the most theoretical to the most practical”, says Anders Björklund.

The week also features other events, including an exciting debate on the topic “Can Neuroscience Explain the Human Mind?” that will take place on 9 September and that will also be live-streamed. See the webpage for this event at lu.se for more information.