Neuroscience is one of Bristol's strengths and one of the great things about Bristol is that it has managed to get individual neuroscientists and neurologist talking and collaborating. This is hugely important because the brain is so complex and the skills and insights that will be needed to understand it are spread across a myriad of different disciplines. The liveliness of cross-disciplinary discussion here is thanks to Bristol Neuroscience, the structure set up to help the Bristol neuroscientific community to act like a community. Bristol Neuroscience is ten years old this year and it celebrated with a festival.
The Bristol Neuroscience 10th Anniversary festival had interactive stands where you could watch a cockroach leg respond to an electrical impulse, knit a neuron or test your reaction times, it had historical stands and stands presenting the diversity range of research taking place in Bristol. There were also two days of public talks with talks from local researcher, all the talks were free but "sold out" in the sense that all the tickets were taken. The speakers included our own Conor Houghton who gave a lay person's introduction to information theory and neuroscience; the image is one he used in his talk to illustrate our brains ability to quickly extract salience, in this case to spot the murder in Strangers on a Train in a crowd of tennis fans.