What is “Dear Neuroscience”?

“Dear Neuroscience” is an event series that explores new ways of conducting neuroscience research by bringing together scientists, artists, teachers, clinicians, parents, and children to co-create sensory explorations of neural phenomena “in the wild”. We want to ask our audience, “What’s something in your daily life that makes you wonder about brains? What are your burning questions for neuroscience? What experiences have you had in the ‘real world’ that you hope neuroscientists are studying?”

We believe that neuroscience research can learn a lot from projects that involve our audience at all stages of the research process: picking the questions to study, designing the study setup, running the experiment, analysing the results, and discussing our conclusions. Changing our tactics as a neuroscience community in this way allows us to harness the many direct and personal experiences with brains that every living person has while trying to navigate a complex and highly interconnected society. This intuition for how brains work “in the real world” is an enormously valuable perspective that is difficult to access in a traditional neuroscience laboratory.

We hope to access this “beyond the lab” perspective through the Dear Neuroscience events. A fundamental goal of each event is to generate a list of testable hypotheses which can guide or expand existing research projects, or motivate new research programmes based on well-documented interest and/or robust anecdotal evidence. We also hope to connect potential collaborators who are looking for a community of researchers eager to engage in broad topics of study that require expertise from a variety of disciplines.

Recent Events

Check out our most recent Dear Neuroscience event: “Touch and Proprioception”

Participate!

If you would like to submit a question, inspired by something in your daily life, that makes you wonder about the brain and our senses of touch and proprioception, please submit your question(s) via this form! Your questions will be used as input to shape and define upcoming Dear Neuroscience events.

Acknowledgements

“Dear Neuroscience” is conceptualized and organized by Dr. Danbee Kim, PhD.

Header image: from the first Dear Neuroscience event, “Orchestrating the Brain”.
Photo credit: Jake Fairnie.

Contact Info

Any other questions or comments? Send us an email!

Past Events

March 29, 2019: “A Vestibular Circus”

Join us for a mini-event to whet your appetite for “neuroscience in the wild”! Teaching staff from the National Centre for Circus Arts share how they study and mentor humans who push their vestibular systems to awe-inspiring extremes. We’ll discuss some case studies from both the circus world and neuroscience labs, then try out some of the drills and interventions used in the National Centre’s student curriculum!

This mini-event will take place at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre on Friday, March 29, 2019, starting at 4:30pm.

May 31, 2018: “Orchestrating the Brain”

This “workshop of musicians and neuroscientists” was created in collaboration with Dan Bates, Artistic Director of the Fitzrovia Arts Festival. We explored the similarity between neurons in the brain and musicians in an orchestra, while highlighting one profound difference: as far we know, there is no “conductor” in the brain.

Check out this article published in the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre’s Public Engagement blog to learn more.