Memories are made of this - Prof. Eleanor Maguire
The School of Psychology, UCD, inaugurates its Distiguished Scholar annual award with a lecture by Prof. Eleanor Maguire on March 23rd, 2011, at 7.30pm in UCD, Belfield (Theatre C004, Health Sciences Building). Prof Maguire will give a presentation entitled ‘Memories are made of this’ which will explore our ability to recollect the past and to plan future actions. This lecture will draw on the latest advances in neuroimaging technology as well as on recent evidence gathered from patients with brain damage.Prof. Maguire is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. She heads the Memory and Space research laboratory at the Centre, where her team studies how memories are formed, represented and recollected by the human brain. She has won a number of prizes for outstanding contributions to science, including the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine. Her earlier work became widely known when she showed that the grey matter in London cab drivers’ brains was enlarged, helping them store detailed mental maps of the city. She argues that despite many decades of research, significant gaps in our knowledge remain in how the brain supports a person’s lifetime of experiences. Prof Maguire conducted her PhD research, on the topic of real-world spatial memory following temporal-lobe surgery in humans, at UCD (School of Psychology) and Beaumont Hospital, Dublin. In this lecture, she will review the latest advances in brain imaging technology and patient testing, and consider the most recent theoretical frameworks that seek to explain our capacity for mental time travel.
The free of charge public lecture inaugurates an annual Distinguished Scholar award series by the School of Psychology, UCD which aims to identify the current and future key thinkers and researchers in world psychology.