On Wed 5 Feb, 180 year 10 students attended our annual Science Symposium. We welcomed two professors from Oxford University to talk about the human brain. 

The first talk, Art, Illusions and the Visual Brain, was given by Prof Kennard from the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. After an introduction to brain-imaging in normal subjects, he described the visual consequences of brain damage in stroke patients and the resultant discrepancies between perception and reality  

Prof Sridhar Vasudevan from the Department of Pharmacology spoke about the circadian clock in his lecture How does Your Circadian Clock Make You Tick. We learnt about the mechanisms regulating it, the physiological processes controlled by it, what occurs when it is disrupted and possible ways to address such disruptions  

Alas, the morning went too quickly! The allocated fifteen minutes for Q&A was evidently not enough for our students’ insatiable minds. A few groups came forward with more questions at the end. To quote our visitors ‘we all thought the students were very well behaved, engaged and asked some great questions.’