Whats to come: Quantum Consciousness, Free Will and Head Transplants...
We pride ourselves on hosting the best academic events on campus throughout the year. We also make sure to have our fair share of fun. If you have any suggestions for events you’d like to see, shoot us an email!
Subscribe to our Facebook page and newsletter to keep up-to-date!
What we have had so far:
Meet and greet: Pizza in the Park
Our First event of the 2017/18 academic year was a pizza social for all of our members. It was great seeing so many faces old and new in the idilic setting of Gordon square gardens - one of the many beautiful parks in the bloomsbury area surrounding UCL.
September 2017
Connect 4 Bar Crawl
Just 2 days later we had our second social of the year! This year our annual bar crawl saw first year freshers being tied together into human chains as they attempted to make their way through UCL. We spread the event across the UCL Bars so that new students had a chance to get to know their local watering holes.
September 2017
Talk: The Neuroscience of Religious Beliefs
Our first talk of year came from the fantastic Reverend Professor Alasdair Coles from the University of Cambridge. He gives insight into the neuroanatomy of religious beliefs and leaves us wondering about the line between treating a pathophysiological disorder if it results in the individual having self-identified positive experiences. You can catch the talk for free from our Facebook page, just click here.
October 2017
Talk: UCL Nobel Prize Lecture
In October we invited 2014 Nobel laureate Prof Edvard Moser to speak for us. This talk was cohosted with the Gatsby Unit for computational Neuroscience. Prof Moser spoke about recent work which has come out of his lab including circuits for encoding time and space in the entorhinal cortex, old findings on Grid cells as well as as well touching on future directions for research into Hippocampal and Entorhinal cortical spatial coding.
October 2017
Talk: Quantum Conciousness
At the end of October we were honoured to host Prof. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and the director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Prof Hameroff spoke about his contentious work with Roger Penrose. His studies on anesthetics which selectively erase consciousness by acting on intra-neuronal microtubules have led him to believe that they are the very thing orchestrating our consciousness.
October 2017
Conference: Applying Neuroscience to the Social Sciences
In November we cohosted a day conference with LSE Students union. The speakers: Prof Wolfram Schultz - the University of Cambridge, Decision and risk: is neuroeconomics the science of dopamine?. Prof Dick Swaab - University of Amsterdam, The male and female brain: Is gender carved in our brains? Prof Patrick Haggard - University College London, Autonomy and coercion: the elusive sense of agency. Dr Baland Jalal - University of Cambridge, Mirrors in the mind: ghosts, phantom pain and disembodiment. Dr Benedetto De Martino -University College London, When is a loss a loss? Does loss aversion explain irrational decisions?
Talk: Head Transplants - Reality or Distant Future?
The Italian Neurosurgeon Prof. Sergio Canaveral was planning to transplant a human head onto a donor body. With the news that his collaborators in China had performed the first "successful" transplantation of a dead head from one corpse to another we wanted to know whether Prof. Canavero was pseudoscientist-lunatic or an unappreciated visionary who would change medicine forever? To discuss this we invited Prof. Robert Brownstone the Brain Research Trust Chair of Neurosurgery at UCL Institute of Neurology and Prof. Robert Horne a UCL Academic Lead for the Centre for Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation (CASMI). Together, they discussed the feasibility of a head transplant as well as what would a successful surgery mean for modern medicine. We were honored to have them join us for drinks afterwards where they both concluded that Prof Canavero is probably more of a pseudoscientist-lunatic than a visionary.
Social: Christmas Drinks
We ended a very successful 2017 with our annual christmas party!
