Date/Time
Date(s) - 27 Jan 2014
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location
U of A Centennial Hall
What: The Evolving Brain Lecture Series
When: Mondays, Jan. 27 to March 10, at 7 p.m.
Where: Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd. Visitor pay parking is available in the Tyndall Avenue Garage, 880 E. Fourth St.
Admission: All lectures are free and open to the public. To learn more, visit the College of Science Spring 2014 Lectures website.
The University of Arizona College of Science‘s popular spring lecture series will present six free lectures exploring the evolution of the astonishingly complex human brain.
The topics to be covered over the entire series include brain imaging, the history of brain surgery, the ancestral circuits that can be found in the modern brain and the essentially perfect way our brains solve problems. The first lecture will be on Monday, Jan. 27, at 7 p.m. in Centennial Hall on the UA campus.
The human brain is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
Layered upon its ancestral core of ancient molecules and neural circuits, new structures evolved that expand the capacity of our brains to process information flexibly and to perform complex behaviors.
Human brains are continuously remodeled by environmental forces and by the enormous sum of information and technologies generated by human inventiveness. These new technologies further expand our power to manipulate information and interact with countless others in remote environments that once were far beyond our reach.
Today sophisticated techniques allow us to probe the structure and function of our own brains and those of other species to better understand how brains originated and where the evolution of our own brain will take us.
All “The Evolving Brain” lectures are free and open to the public. The lectures will be held at Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd., on the UA campus. Pay visitor parking is available in the Tyndall Avenue Garage, 880 E. Fourth St.
The scheduled lectures:
Jan. 27 | Time Traveling: What Our Brains Share With Beetle Brains
Director, Center for Insect Science
UA Regents’ Professor of Neuroscience
Emerging evidence suggests that distantly related animals such as mice and flies manifest similar behaviors because they have genealogically corresponding brain centers. The view is that a common ancestor had already evolved circuits for behavioral actions, memory of such actions, and their consequences more than half a billion years ago. Evidence that those circuits have been inherited through geological time challenges how we as a species relate to animals that we view as wholly different from ourselves.