Human Brain

Programme

9.10 am Opening of symposium: Paul Upstone (Head of Biology, Cooper School)

Chair: Mrs Kasia Lewis (Director, OIBC)

9.15 am Prof Sridhar Vasudevan (Department of Pharmacology, Oxford University): How does your circadian clock make you tick

10.00 am Q&A session

10.10 am Break

10.20 am Prof Chris Kennard (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford): The Visual Brain – the house of deceits of the sight

11.05 am Q&A session

11.15 am Close of symposium

How does your circadian clock make you tick

Sridhar Vasudevan

(Department of Pharmacology, Oxford University)

Virtually all aspects of mammalian physiology and behaviour display 24-hour cyclical variations, driven by a circadian clock. In mammals, the master clock housed in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is located in the anterior hypothalamus of the brain. This clock entrains the peripheral clocks present within the various organs/cells of the body, resulting in coordinated rhythmic physiological outputs. The uniform mechanism generating oscillations throughout the body stems from fluctuations in clock gene expression, consisting of transcriptional-translational feedback loops. This mechanism is responsible for controlling a fifth of the genome.

In this lecture, we will explore the mechanisms regulating the circadian clock, the physiological processes controlled by this system, what occurs when the circadian architecture is disrupted and possible ways to address such disruptions.

The Visual Brain – the house of deceits of the sight

Christopher Kennard

(Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford)

When we look at the world around us the large area of the brain devoted to vision – the visual brain – processes the images received by our eyes, yet how are all the attributes of the visual scene – form, colour, motion, depth and much else besides – processed in separate but interconnected cortical areas, which then generate a unitary visual percept?

There are many different methods to study the visual brain, but here the focus will be on the use of visual illusions, brain imaging in normal subjects and the visual consequences of damage to different parts of the visual brain in patients after a stroke. For example, some of these patients can identify patterns and shapes but not colour, whereas others are unaware of movement, or fail to recognise familiar faces or objects. It will become apparent that the visual brain often has to generate hypotheses to interpret the inputs from the visual scene, and this may lead to discrepancies between perception and reality.

Useful additional reading

Seeing Through Illusions: Making Sense of the Senses.  Richard Gregory (2009)

The man who mistook his wife for a hat.  Oliver Sacks (2011)