Scientific Organisation of Medical Students

The 2022 Brain Awareness Week campaign spanned the entire week. We tapped into the audience’s notion of music and made an analogy about how a brain works. We took advantage of better meeting opportunities and had neuroscientists present their work and shed some light (or tones, for that matter) on auditory and brain states mechanisms.

We engaged our target audience – the general public, high-school students, (bio)medical students and members of the local academia in a hybrid format. Part of our audience was able to join in person for the events, while everything remained available online as well. We used social media for our campaign and we managed to reach ~16.000 people with news about the Brain Awareness Week.

The events comprised of an opening symposium, with in-person invited guests lectures on auditory neuroscience (Conny-Kopp Scheinpflug, Dardo Ferreiro, Mihai Stancu), a demo experiment explaining sound discrimination mechanisms in humans, an audience presentation competition with subjects related to The Music of the Brain (a BAW Dana Prize was awarded to our best presenter), a comprehensive Open Lab Day, in which people came in direct contact with research groups, projects, equipment and experiments. We continued with an active recruiting session for those interested in joining the neuroscience research groups at our university, with more than 40 people being interviewed. The 5th day had the SNN Round Table discussion, where we brought together scientists, clinicians, musicians and the audience in a warm and stimulating environment, a popular café in Bucharest, and sparked a conversation that lasted for 4 hours. Everything concluded the next day with a collective viewing of the “Brain on Fire” film.

Organising the 2022 BAW benefited our community by showing the general public how certain parts of their brain work. This was especially useful after a 2-year pandemic during which they heard an unfiltered variety of things about the mind, behaviour and neuroscience in general. Our societies kept their years-long tradition of organising the BAW and come in contact with the general public – raising awareness and bringing brain research to people.