Neuroscience Society of Turkey

Neuroscience Society of Turkey (NST) organized public and school activities in Izmir for BAW. GENERAL PUBLIC ACTIVITIES – Press release on BAW distributed by Ege Ajans to 3000 news and media outlets of Turkey – TV and radio program broadcasting live. Audience: ~20.000 – Newspaper article ‘Brain Health: 14 Facts’ reaching 1.000.000 people – Two public conferences: Prof. Gökçay on stroke, and Prof. Pırıldar on depression. Total audience: 500. – Two informational brochures on topics of this year (stroke and depression), were distributed to 1000 people. -‘‘Neuroquiz”: To public, A minitest of five questions was made at local cafes on brain – 50 people – Movie evening: Ex Machina, 2015 with psychiatrist Prof. Gönül’s talk commenting before and after the movie. Audiance: 150 people SCHOOL ACTIVITIES – Nursery school, age 5-6, hands-on activities, coloring and staining the brain and neuron, talking about the brain 50 students – Two high school lectures (Profs. Sengul, Balkan and Keser); 450 students – Neuroanatomy Lab Tour (Prof. Ozturk) – to 40 high school students, books on brain were given as gift to the students NST also supported BAW activities in cities Manisa, Denizli, Trabzon and Konya with public conferences and school visits. The school activities (lectures and lab tour), public conferences and movie evening reached to many people and were very successful. Students were very enthusiastic about learning abour the brain.

Apart from being a wonderful experience for the faculty and neuroscience masters/PhD students involved , we believe our neuroanatomy lab tour and school lectures had a high impact on high school students, making them very much interested in neuroscience research. Our activities have also increased publicity of NST. Also our two public lectures on – stroke and depression increased public awareness, with support from local municipalities, our lectures reached to a very big audiance.

Planning in advance is very important. Contacting local municipalities is very important. They have supported us by giving their public halls for our use, and inviting people to the public conferences even by phone calls and sms messages. We gave five sets of three different books as gifts to two high school libraries, their biology teachers and one book for every student who participated in our lab tour. We believe books are great gifts as sources of information that will reach to many. Also, we have distributed 500 flyers on stroke and 500 flyers on depression with very useful information, people have found them very useful and apprecaited it.