London's date with the fun side of brain science

Sandhya Sekar, reporter, and Liz Else, associate editor

Changing Minds by Chloe Ride of Winchester School of Art, depicting the confusion a person with Alzheimer's may feel (Image: Russell Sach)

In the early 1960s, it was all about putting people on the moon. Thirty years on, the quest for the human genome was making headlines. Now we?ve entered a time of neurobuzz, with the announcement of President Obama?s $100 million initiative last week to map the activity of the brain. And just a few days before that came news of the $1.3 billion Human Brain Project mounted by the European Union, which includes a bid to simulate a brain.

At a more human and realistic scale, however, there?s a brief chance to explore what we know about neuroscience right now at Wonder: Art and science on the brain, a series of events in London.

(Image: Heidi Cartwright/Wellcome Images)

While some of our reporters will covering the British Neuroscience Association conference that runs alongside Wonder, we got to play in what the organisers called the Wonder Street Fair.

Among our favourite ?stalls? was one that posed the question ?Are You Smarter Than A??? Comparisons are always invidious, and this one certainly was. Even baby chimps can outsmart the human ability to sort human faces from chimp faces. And so can human babies at 6 months old - but they lose that ability at 9 months.

Then there was Changing Minds through Neuroscience Inspired Fashion, which brought together Winchester School of Art and the Southampton Neuroscience Group, both in the UK, in a bid to fight the stigma and misconceptions surrounding mental illness.

They made garments representing all sorts of conditions: paradoxically, ?stroke? was almost lovely, being built round the concept of a butterfly - with the idea of feeling free but also emotionally trapped. Alzheimer?s was - fittingly - rather terrifying, taking the form of a woolly body suit that completely covered the face. Nightmare.

Best of all, in terms of feeling good about oneself, was the chance to explore lovely mathematical games that emerged from research in the Cohen Kadosh lab at the University of Oxford into, among other things, how neurons specialise to represent number and learning in humans and non-human primates.?You can, for example, use your whole body to show where a fraction should appear on a big screen - imagine moving a few centimetres to the left of centre to capture where 11/40 would be on a screen with a scale of 0 to 50.

And there?s more. Today at the Barbican Hall, comedian and actor Ruby Wax will be on stage with the BBC?s Claudia Hammond, talking about Wax?s conversion to the neuroscience cause after a brush with depression and debilitating mental illness.

The Barbican cinema is running movies that showcase the mind until 10 April. Among them are the cult (original version, that is) The Manchurian Candidate or more obscure documentaries like Titicut Follies, which looks at how the state treats the criminally insane.

If you have only a lunch hour free, why not spend it at a tropical oasis in the heart of London, at the Barbican Conservatory? At a ?Packed Lunch? session tomorrow, Katharina Wulff from the University of Oxford will be talking about ?social jetlag? - how our internal body clocks are getting messed up by artificial lighting at night.

On 10 April, Henrietta Bowden-Jones, founder and director of the CNWL National Problem Gambling Clinic in London, will check out the roots of problem gambling: what makes us go back for more? Genes, upbringing or brain chemistry gone haywire?

If you?re in the mood to bounce neuro questions off some of the best brains in the business, there is a panel discussion tomorrow called ?I'm a Neuroscientist Get Me Out of Here - Live?. Comedian and science presenter Helen Arney will throw your questions to five brain scientists, and you can choose the best answer. The winner will receive a donation to their favourite charity.

So - what do you want to ask? Hurry on down and find out.

Wonder: Art and science on the brain is at the Barbican Centre, London, until 10 April.

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