Hey, Wake Up, It’s Brain Awareness Week

Your brain doesn’t come with an instruction manual.

The Dana Foundation’s annual Brain Awareness Week (BAW), March 10-16, seems particularly appropriate and useful this time around, after a year in which brain-based disease models of human behaviors came under fire from social scientists and neuroscientists alike.

A recent analysis of the coverage of neuroscience in the popular press showed that the number of news articles using the terms "neuroscience" or "neuroscientist" had increased by a factor of 30 between 1985 and 2009. Moreover, the NIH's massive Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, designed to speed up our understanding of the neural workings of the human brain in the years ahead, is in progress.

Brain Awareness Week, which takes place each year during the third week of March, is the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. The Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) administers a BAW grants program for European partners.

During the week, campaign partners around the world organize activities to educate their communities about the brain and brain research. A product of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, Brain Awareness Week “unites the efforts of partner organizations worldwide in a celebration of the brain for people of all ages. Activities are limited only by the organizers’ imaginations and include open days at neuroscience labs; exhibitions about the brain; lectures on brain-related topics; social media campaigns; displays at libraries and community centers; classroom workshops; and more.”

In league with hundreds of governmental and private partner institutions around the world, BAW’s enormous calendar of events testifies to the success of this outreach. The week kicks off with an interview with Kelley Remole, Ph.D., the director of neuroscience outreach at Columbia University and the co-president of the Greater NYC Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience. 

Here you will find a pile of publications and resources.

And here is a bunch of downloadable brain stuff for kids.

What is Brain Awareness Week?

Celebrate your sentience March 12-18.

Gather ‘round, children, and the Dana Foundation will tell you an amazing tale about… the You Man Brain…

Well, that is, the HUMAN brain—and the many ways of increasing understanding and awareness of this little three-pound marvel. Officially the brainchild of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives in New York and the European Dana Alliance for the Brain, “Brain Awareness Week (BAW) is the global campaign to increase public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research,” according to the BAW website.  

Founded in 1996, Brain Awareness Week is designed to unite partner organizations around the world “in a week-long celebration of the brain.” Partners include universities, hospitals, schools, government agencies, and service organizations. Partner organizations come up with creative and innovative community activities to educate people of all ages “about the brain and the promise of brain research.” For example, on Wednesday the Dana Alliance is sponsoring a “brain bee” at The Rockefeller University in New York City, where students from 21 area high schools will go head-to-head on their knowledge of neuroscience.

To see the full list of partnerships, from 41 countries, go HERE. For a list of events planned for the week, take a look HERE.  Events include open houses at neuroscience laboratories, special brain exhibitions at museums, displays and lectures at community centers, and workshops in the classroom.

If you’re feeling cocky, you can test your brain with several challenges at http://www.testmybrain.org/

Sadly, none of this hoopla will necessarily solve certain perennial brain conundrums, such as:

--If you can’t change your mind, how do you know you have one?

--Is that hole in a man’s penis really there to get oxygen to his brain?

--How can we believe that the brain is the most important organ, when the brain is the organ telling us that?

And finally, the one that keeps me awake at night:

-- How did the scarecrow know he didn't have a brain?

Friday File

Book and blog recommendations for the weekend.

Books

I just finished reading a splendid book, Barbara Oakley’s Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. Oakley, a systems engineer at Oakland University in Michigan, has done a great service for interested non-scientists by picking apart the intricate genetics of psychopathy and antisocial behavior.

Primarily a history of borderline personality disorder and the “great men” who suffered from it, Oakley takes the “nature-nurture” debate to the next level, asserting that bad behavior is a genetic propensity triggered by environmental influences—precisely the argument I make about addiction in my book, The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction.

Oakley deftly beats back the usual panoply of objections to genomic research—that it is a slippery slope leading to eugenics, or that it is an excuse for bad behavior. Even worse, for many people, Evil Genes suggests that individual ethics are largely biochemically determined. The “successfully sinister,” as she calls them, have a baffling ability to charm their way to the top, and the author suggests some evolutionary reasons why this might be so.

Overall, Oakley makes a strong, eye-opening case for the importance of modern neuroscience in the quest to understand human behavior. This book should come as a serious shock to a generation of lawyers, judges and forensic psychologists who have spent a lifetime adhering to the “blank slate” view of human nature, when the “bad seed” analogy appears to be closer to the truth.

Blogs

Check out Brain Blogger for a look at “Topics from Multidimensional BioPsychoSocial Perspectives,” as the site is subtitled. Recent posts include articles about antibiotic overuse, gender reassignment, autism, torture, proprioception, neural plasticity, and my own article on marijuana withdrawal, which has drawn a panoply of heated responses.

A fascinating site with a multidisciplinary perspective.

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