During the academic year 2013/14, a cross-scientific course "Culture and Health" on research student level will be given at the Karolinska Institute. Internationally leading scientists are invited to give lectures, followed by informal discussions with the participants.
Invited are both research students in medical and biological sciences at KI and the universities in Uppsala and Stockholm, and research students at artistic faculties and departments such as pedagogics and history of art and -music. The lectures will focus on general issues, and facilitate a fruitful discussion among representatives from various academic disciplines and research paradigms.
The invited lecturers represent research in a wide range of cultural expressions, from law and ethics through literature and visual arts to dance and music. They investigate both the direct expression of culture in the brain, and its effects on healing, rehabilitation and learning.
OBS: Course starts 30/9 15.00
at Samulessalen, Scheelelaboratoriet, Tomtebodavägen 6, Karolinska Institutet Campus Solna.
Look here for scheduled lectures
Invited speakers:
Antonio Damasio: The neural and evolutionary basis of emotions
Professor of Neuroscience. Director Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern Califonia. His research has helped to elucidate the neural basis for the emotions and has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition, learning and decision-making.
Damasio & Carvalho.The nature of feelings: evolutionary and neurobiological origins. Nat Rev Neurosci. 14:143 (2013)
Feinstein et al. The human amygdala and the induction and experience of fear. Curr Biol. 21:34 (2011)
Robert Zatorre: How brain experiences music
Professor, Dept. of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Montreal Neurological Institute. Dr. Robert Zatorre is interested in the neuronal basis of auditory events, specifically speech and music. He studies brain-damaged patients as well as normal subjects using contemporary brain-imaging techniques, including PET and MRI. One of his projects investigates the ability to "hear" music in the mind, the goal being to determine whether the same part of the brain is used to perceive sounds originating internally and externally.
Salimpoor et al, Anatomically Distinct Dopamine Release during Anticipation and Experience of Peak Emotion to Music, Nature Neurosci 14:257 (2011)
Madeleine Hackney: Dance in treatment of Parkinsons disease
Assistant Professor, Emory University Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology). She has studied effects of traditional exercise, Tai Chi and partnered dance & tango classes, on physical function and quality of life in Parkinson Disease, older adults and those with serious mental illness. Her present work aims to determine the characteristics of physical rehabilitative strategies, in terms of motor pattern and timing, dosage, duration, intensity, and overall effectiveness that will have high compliance while enhancing balance, mobility and quality of life and reducing fall risk for older adults with low vision.
Hackney & Earhart, Tai Chi improves balance and mobility in people with Parkinson disease, Gait & Posture, 28:456 (2008)
Hackney & Earhart, Effects of Dance on Gait and Balance in Parkinson's Disease: A Comparison of Partnered and Nonpartnered Dance Movement. Neurorehab neural rapeir 24:384 (2010)
Torkel Klingberg: Working memory and attention in learning
Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet. Klingberg studies the neural basis for cognitive development during childhood and training-induced plasticity of the brain, especially working memory and attention.
Klingberg T, Training and plasticity of working memory, Trends in Cognitive Science 14: 317 (2010)
Dumontheil & Klingberg, Brain activity during a visuospatial working memory task predicts arithmetical performance 2 years later Cerebral Cortex, 22:1078 (2011)
Stefan Koelsch: Musical semantics and emotions in brain
Prof. for Biological Psychology and Music Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin. Research interests: Neural correlates of emotion , Neurocognition of music , Music Therapy, Similarities and differences between music and language processing , Neural correlates of cognition & action , Emotional personality and the unaware mind.
Perani et al, Functional specializations for music processing in the human newborn brain, PNAS 107:4758 (2010)
Koelsch, Towards a neural basis of processing musical semantics, Physics of Life Reviews 8:89 (2011)
Fritz et al, Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music, Curr Biol 19:573 (2009)
Mary Helen Immordino Yang : How storytelling awakes emotions
Assistant Professor, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern Califonia. She has studied emotional reactions during storytelling by fMRI. She is an affective neuroscientist and human development psychologist who studies the neural, psychophysiological and psychological bases of social emotion, self-awareness and culture and their implications for development and schools.
Immordino-Yang et al, Neural re-use in the social and emotional brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 33:275 (2010).
Immordino-Yang et al, Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. PNAS. 106:8021 (2009)
Teppo Särkämö: Music and literature in stroke rehabilitation
Dr. Särkämö works as an Academy of Finland post-doctoral researcher at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit (Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki) and at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research (University of Jyväskylä). Dr. Särkämö’s research focuses on the neural mechanisms of music and speech perception (and their disorders, namely amusia and aphasia), neuroplasticity of auditory and cognitive functions, and the use of music-based interventions in various neurological illnesses (e.g., stroke, dementia, and traumatic brain injury).
Sarkamo et al, Music and Speech Listening Enhance the Recovery of Early Sensory Processing after Stroke. J Cogn Neurosci 22:2716 (2010)
Sarkamo et al, Music listening enhances cognitive recovery and mood after middle cerebral artery stroke. Brain 131:866 (2008)
Isabelle Peretz: Musical brain.
Professor department of psychology, University of Montréal. Co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS). Research Interests: Biological foundations of music. Brain organization principles for music. Music-specific impairments (acquired and congenital). Neural correlates of musical emotions. Speech prosody. Music and speech in singing. Neural correlates of pitch-related deficits.
Cousineau et al, The basis of musical consonance as revealed by congenital amusia, PNAS 109:19858 (2012)
Peretz et al, The amusic brain: in tune, out of key, and unaware. Brain 132:1277 (2009)
Charles Limb: Locating creativity by fMRI of jazz and rap improvisation
Associate Professor - Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, John Hopkins, Baltimore
Faculty, Peabody Conservatory of Music. Watch Dr. Charles Limb's presentation at TEDx MidAtlantic, where he showed the results of what he and his team uncovered when they put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out how the brain works during musical improvisation. The research has deep implications for the understanding of creativity of all kinds.
Limb & Braun, Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation Plos One 3:e1679 (2008)
Michael Gazzaniga: Does culture make us smarter?
Director of the Sage Center for the study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Has been leader for Learning, Arts, and the Brain, that advances our understanding of the effects of music, dance, and drama education on other types of learning. Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas.
He has earlier made remarkable advances in our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another. He has published many books accessible to a lay audience, such as Mind Matters and Nature's Mind
Funk et al, The functional brain architecture of human morality, Curr opin neurobiol 19:678 (2009)
Gazzaniga, The Law and Neuroscience, Neuron 60:412 (2008)
Fredrik Ullén: How musicianship transforms the brain
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet. He studies neuropsychology of expert performance, specificially mechanisms of skill learning, brain plasticity, motivation and creativity among musicians.
Bengtsson et al, Extensive piano practicing has regionally specific effects on white matter development, Nature Neurosci 8:1148 (2005)
Dopamine D2 receptor density in the limbic striatum is related to implicit but not explicit movement sequence learning, PNAS 107:7574 (2010)
Nina Kraus: How early musical training shapes the adult brain
Professor of Neurobiology & Physiology, Otolaryngology, Hugh Knowles Chair. Nina Kraus investigates the neurobiology underlying speech and music perception and learning-associated brain plasticity. She studies normal listeners throughout the lifespan, clinical populations (poor-readers; autism; hearing loss), auditory experts (musicians, bilinguals) and an animal model.
Wong et al, Musical experience shapes human brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch patterns, Nature Neurosci 10:420 (2007)
Kraus & Chandrasekaran, Music training for the development of auditory skills. Nature Rev Neurosci 11:599 (2010)
A Little Goes a Long Way: How the Adult Brain Is Shaped by Musical Training in Childhood, J Neurosci 32:11507 (2012)
Jaime Gómez Ramírez and Sarah Belden: The emerging filed of neuroaesthetics
Jaime Gomez-Ramirez is PhD and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at Okayama University, Japan. He is also a Research Scholar at the Universidad Politécnica in Madrid. Sarah Belden has worked professionally within the art world since 1999 in several diverse capacities. In 2006 she launched Curators Without Borders in Berlin, an innovative gallery and curatorial platform dedicated to exhibiting Contemporary Art.
Neuroaesthetics can be seen as a way of bridging the interdisciplinary gap between art and science; a recent scientific discipline that can help to finally dissolve the "two cultures."
He presented "Mapping New Neural Pathways".
A.K. Pradeep: neuromarketing
Founder and chief executive of NeuroFocus, a neuromarketing firm based in Berkeley.
“Volunteers in NeuroFocus marketing tests wear a fabric cap that houses EEG sensors and an eye-tracking device while they look at a commercial, use a Web site or view a movie trailer. The dual devices enable researchers to connect the volunteers’ brain patterns with the exact video images or banner ads or logos they’re viewing. “By measuring brain waves, we are able to measure attention, emotion and memory,” says Dr. Pradeep, who holds a Ph.D. in engineering. “We basically compute the deep subconscious response to stimuli.”
Usha Goshwani: Neuroeducation - from lab to classroom
Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience, Director, Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Fellow, St John's College, Cambridge. Key research projects include the neural basis of developmental dyslexia, the neural basis of speech and language impairments, and the neural basis of rhythmic motor behaviour.
Goswami, Neuroscience and education: from research to practice? Nat Rev Neurosci 7:406 (2006)
Goswami, Universals of reading: Developmental evidence for linguistic plausibility, Behav Brain Sci 35: 287 (2012)
Details
The course is given in English from October 2013 through spring 2014.
Approximately ten workshops consisting of a lecture followed by informal discussions with the lecturer.
Examination through participation in discussions and a written home-exam. Number of "högskolepoäng": 2,0
If You are a master student, not yet registered as a PhD student or already have taken Your PhD, You are still very welcome to join the course.
The course takes place at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology. It is organized through the Board of Cultural Affairs of KI.
Responsible for the course: Professor Ingemar Ernberg, Department of Microbiology, Tumor- and Cell Biologi. Organisers: Professor Gunnar Bjursell, Board of Cultural Affairs KI (Gunnar.K.Bjursell@ki.se), and Henrik Brändén (h.branden@comhem.se).
More information at http://kiwas.ki.se/katalog/katalog/kurs/1590.
Application
Apply by e-mail stating
- Name
- Personal number
- Position, Department and University/Higher Education Institution
- Whether and where You formally are a research student
- Short motivation why You want to follow the course (max 250 words).
sent to Henrik Brändén at h.branden@comhem.se with cc Gunnar.K.Bjursell@ki.se.
Prolonged possibility to apply until 20th of August.