How billions of interconnected cells in the brain can interpret and regulate all our bodily functions as well as mediate our experiences of interactions with and responses to the world around us is a huge and fascinating question that many different disciplines have attempted to tackle. This lecture considers what we have learned so far about the principles of neural encoding and how they may begin to explain our memories, emotions and conscious awareness.
Keith Kendrick is a Systems and Behavioural Neuroscientist at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, and Emeritus Gresham Professor of Physics.
Behavioral neuroscientist Keith Kendrick demonstrates how human brains learn to memorize and recognize faces by describing his experiments tracking brain activity in sheep. "They can discriminate up to about 50 different sheep faces ... and at least 10 different human faces," explains Kendrick. "And, they can remember them for several years."
Medical specialty concerned with nervous system function and disorders. Clinical neurology began in the mid-19th century, when mapping of the functional areas of the brain first began and understanding of the causes of conditions such as epilepsy improved. The development of electroencephalography in the 1920s aided in the diagnosis of neurological disease, as did the development of computerized axial tomography in the 1970s and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging in the 1980s. In addition to dealing with physical disorders (e.g., tumours, trauma), neurology is unique among medical specialties in its intersection with psychiatry. Greater understanding of the brain chemistry of disorders such as schizophrenia and depression has led to a wide array of effective drugs that nevertheless work best in conjunction with psychotherapy. Side effects of drug or surgical therapy can be serious, and many nervous system disorders have no effective treatment.