In 1972, neurosurgeon Joseph Bogen argued that a giant walkthrough brain should be constructed. He envisioned a 60 storey high building, a science museum of the human brain, built to educate large numbers of people by taking them on guided tours inside.

A giant walkthrough brain, as charming and audacious as it was, was never built. The cost makes it unlikely that a physical version will ever be erected, but modern computer technology and advances in computational human anatomy models provide another way: the exploration of a three-dimensional virtual human brain.

“The Giant Walkthrough Brain” is an innovative, engaging, public science communication project aimed at taking a live audience on a musically driven, larger-than-life virtual tour of the human brain. It is both a live theatrical performance and a multimedia project, including dramatic, 3-D computer animations and live, original music.

It’s an hour-long tour of the brain; it’s an introduction to a serious of famous personalities, all of whom taught us something crucial about the brain and it is a musical production with songs written and performed by The Free Radicals. All the while, a vivid, anatomically correct and detailed model of the brain appears on a huge screen behind the band. And the audience travels through it.

THE TEAM:

This project has a staff: I work with Trevor Day of MRU and all the Free Radicals, Dr. Christian Jacob and his team in computing science at the U of Calgary, among them Tatiana Karaman and Natasha Shevchenko, both of whom have been the ‘bus driver’.

July, 2014; first presentation, The Banff Centre

September 2014: World Premiere at Beakerhead. Two sold-out nights at Telus Spark.

April 2015: Two sold-out nights at the Timms Centre in Edmonton.

January 2016: two sold-out nights at the Kelowna Community Theatre.

September 2019, opening the new Science Commons at the University of Lethbridge

Winner of the 2015 Canadian Science Writers’ Award for Science Communication.

¹ Bogen, J.E.: “A Giant Walk-through Brain”. Bull. LA. Neurol. Soc. 37:131 1972

Alzheimer’s, called ‘the plague of the 21st century’ for its dramatic increase in numbers and the challenge it poses to health care. There are no effective treatments, merely a handful of drugs that promise only short-lived alleviation of symptoms.

Everyone has essentially the same three questions about Alzheimer’s: Will I get it? What can I do to lessen that risk, and If I do get it, what then?. These are important questions about vulnerability, taking action, the race for a treatment. The disease is mysterious, but seems even more mysterious than it is: why does it appear to be an unrolling epidemic? There’s more of us, and we’re older. The standard drug targets haven’t yielded anything yet. Maybe it’s time for a rethink.

Watson and Crick; Lennon and McCartney is a presentation on the importance of collaboration for creativity. I compare Watson and Crick’s legendary discovery of the structure of DNA to Lennon and McCartney’s (though mostly Lennon’s) “Strawberry Fields Forever”.  The collaboration piece begins with the fact that they are pairs, but extends to include even rivals across the Atlantic Ocean from England. Both the similarities and differences between the achievements and these unique partnerships contribute to a picture of how creativity works.

Although prions are much less well-known as agents of disease than viruses or bacteria, they are responsible for a slow, but steady epidemic of a disease that threatens deer and elk populations across North America. That’s Chronic Wasting Disease; they’re also the agents of Mad Cow Disease. Two strange diseases caused by a mysterious entity: that alone would qualify prions for status in biology and medicine, as would the fact that they have no DNA/RNA, yet they infect. But all of these might not be as important as the insight that misfolded proteins, prions and others, may play a crucial role in the most serious neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Based on my book of the same name, this talk explores how the scientific approach to consciousness has, if not revolutionized, at the very least reoriented the search for understanding of human consciousness. Consciousness is a difficult topic to study or even to describe. But you know when you’re conscious and when you’re not. And you identify with your conscious mind.

The science reveals that this idea, that consciousness is pre-eminent among all the things our brains do, is a myth. Some go so far as to argue that this myth was probably created by …. consciousness itself.

The best thing about consciousness is that most of us have it, and there are numerous opportunities during the talk to do experiments on (or with) yourself.

A talk with this title would have been very different fifty years ago. Since then a vast amount of data and a profound shift in thinking have made answering ‘yes’ to “Can Animals Think?” seem the reasonable response. That would not have been the case 50 years ago. We know now that crows can think their way through puzzling situations, that many animals mourn their dead, that bees can count. Can they understand what others have on their minds or even reflect on their own thoughts? Probably both, you’re tempted to say. Me too! But still, with all this change, we are different, we humans. Or are we? And what role could consciousness play in all this?