Chrisopher Wren brain imaging

Here is a link to an image Christopher Wren made in the 1660s of the anatomy of the brain which beautifully illustrates the system of blood supply now know as the Circle of Willis after Thomas Willis who wrote the book Cerebri anatome of 1664.

Twin science

Looking at the story of the conjoined twins who have been successfully separated. You can read about the circle of Willis and Christopher Wren here and some of the stuff about how we use our own bodies to read out the movements of others on a thing I did at Nova as part of a sequence on mirror neurons. There's been an interesting show about the historical portrayal of conjoined twins. Finally there's a lot out there about music and culture and here's good starting point about children.

Links to what we've been up to

The special projects team I head at Wellcome Trust have been busy over the summer. Biggest thing is probably the olympic-related experiment for every school child in Britain. We've also been getting dirty at Glastonbury (or in slightly more poetic form in this video). We run broadcast projects of various kinds and drive engagement with health research in developing countries. An overview of the whole topic can be found here.

Slightly irreverent talk about the brain and education

The nice people at sameas have posted a link to a talk I gave in a pub about what neuroscience should or shouldn't tell us about education. (Contains no more bad language than you'd expect from a talk in a pub.)