Edinburgh Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh

Edinburgh Neuroscience organised two new events for Brain Awareness Week 2016. One was an ’enhanced screening’ of the Disney-Pixar movie ‘Inside Out’ at Moorflix Community Cinema in Midlothian, a rural region to the South of Edinburgh. The county does not have a commercial cinema so this community-run enterprise brings almost-current movies to the community in their village Hall. The half-day event started with an afternoon of hands-on activities for the children exploring brain structure/function by making paper brain hats, and explaining about emotions through the creation of ‘emotional clocks’. This was followed by a short introduction talk about the science in the film (by Dr Szu-Han Wang, Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh), followed by its screening. After the film, we rounded off the event by hosting a short Q&A session for the adults – while the children were occupied with eating some brain sweets! The cinema evaluates its events via a ‘bean counter system’ and I’m delighted to report that we scored a whopping 95% top rating! In a departure from our usual outreach events, this year we held a well-attended seminar for researchers by a member of the public (an in-reach event!). Fred Walker is an author and Alzheimer’s Research UK Volunteer Champion and he very kindly came to Edinburgh to introduce neuroscientists to the human side of dementia. In an informative and moving talk, Fred shared his story of Alzheimer’s on the sharp end, as a carer for his wife, Joan, through her illness. Fred has written a blog and published a book about his experiences (www.dementiablog.org/alzheimers-engineers-view/). This event was supported by Alzheimer’s Research UK (www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/).

It is always good to have a focus/target for your outreach actvities – it makes you get on and deliver them! Since we screened ‘inside Out’ we have been invited to 2 other rural community cinemas to deliever the same actvity in their community.

We find that a little forward planning, thinking about our audience, helps a lot. For instance, we wanted to do a question and answer session with the parents at the end of the ‘Inside out’ film screening but realised that the chldren might get restless (normally we do films for adults so this isn’t usually a problem). We purchased some brain-shaped sweets to hand out during the Q&A session to keep the children occupied and it worked!