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Educational activity
Brain Awareness Week: Activities 2012
CEND has contributed to the activities of the Brain Awareness Week since 2003, with a series of initiatives mainly addressed to the general public.
Visit the page "Brain Awareness Week: Archive",
where you will find information about the activities set up by CEND
on the occasions of past editions of the Brain Awareness Week.
After the success of recent editions, with more than 6000 registered participants, CEND came back again to higher education students with a new series of lectures on nervous system and its functions in February 2012.
Lectures were held at the University of Milan from February 13 to 17, 2012. The final programme is available, together with the press release.
Lessons dealt with new topics, with lecturers coming from outside the University of Milan, and more attention given to recent advances in scientific research.
Among the novelties, CEND was proud to open the 2012 cycle with the lecture of Prof. Carlo Caltagirone, Scientific Director of the Institute for Research and Cure Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, who reported on origins and development of Neurologic Sciences. New lectures discussed the influence of genetic and environmental factors on anxiety and depression, the presently known genetic bases of autism, and the mechanism of speech.
Some lectures from past editions participated again with lectures on general interest themes, such as addiction, mechanisms of learning and of brain functioning, mood disorders, neurodenerative diseases and brain surgery.
The topics of the lectures were the following (the lecturer is in brackets):
- The contribution of Italian Neurology to the unraveveling of normal and pathologic functioning of the brain (Prof. Carlo Caltagirone) -
- The reward pathway and drug addiction (Prof. Diego Fornasari) -
- Genes and Environment in development: How to study the factors that influence anxiety and depression (Prof. Marco Battaglia) -
- Neurodegeneration and related diseases (Prof. Vincenzo Silani) -
- How do neurons communicate with one another? (Prof.ssa Michela Matteoli) -
- How do synapses learn? (Dr. Fabrizio Gardone) -
- Mood disorders: biology and treatment (Dr. Daniela Tardito) -
- Anxiety and stress: an equilibrium between normality and pathology (Dr. Raffaella Molteni) -
- Has brain a gender? Biological bases of sexual differentiation (Dr. Alessandra Colciago) -
- Speech in brain (Prof. Stefano Cappa - Dr. Abutalebi) -
- The birth of neuronal networks (Dott. Fabrizio Gardoni) -
- Functional brain surgery supported by images, neurophysiology, and neuropsychology (Prof. Lorenzo Bello) -
- Genetic bases of autism (Prof.ssa Elena Maestrini) -
Lecture abstract can be downloaded by clicking on the green arrows. The slides used during some lectures can also be downloaded by clicking on the blue arrows.
