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 (The Douglas Research Centre) and Oliver Hardt (Dept. of Psychology)

Professor Véronique Bohbot will start this presentation highlighting the therapy of spatial memory training and its effect on Alzheimer's disease. A larger hippocampus has been associated with healthy cognition in normal aging and with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Older adults with better hippocampus-dependent spatial memory showed increased fMRI activity, increased grey matter in the hippocampus, and better overall cognition, regardless of ApoE4 status. Therefore, spatial memory training may provide a therapeutic avenue which may be protective against Alzheimer’s disease.

Professor Oliver Hardt will focus on how and why the brain forgets. Forgetting is thought of as a failure of memory, a glitch, something that should not occur, resulting from a breakdown of normal memory — and, quite naturally, most people worry about it. However, recently it has been discovered that most forgetting is by design and the result of dedicated forgetting processes that are part of normal brain function. Forgetting is therefore not a failure of memory, but a necessary and useful function of memory. He will summarize the latest research on how and why the brain forgets, the benefits of forgetting, and how disorders of forgetting might lead to excessive memory loss, as seen in Alzheimer's disease and other conditions.

Mini-Science 2022: The Brain – Frontiers in Neuroscience

Exciting presentations by some of McGill's leading neuroscientists about the brain, the mind and the neuroscience of living as we now understand it. Find out how the brain and memory changes as we age, or how the bilingual brain functions, and how remarkably emotional our brains are.

All talks are in English.

Discover the Mini-Science series