Professor Niels Birbaumer at Facing Tomorrow 2011

panel: The Drama of Brain Research in the 21st Century

Date: Thursday, June 23rd, 16:30-18:00

As the 21st century progresses, humans are living longer and facing a greater threat of neurological disease. To meet this challenge, we need new approaches to keeping the brain healthy and new ways to repair it when it becomes ill. Above all, we need a new understanding of the way the brain works - of the fundamental mechanisms underlying sensory perception, movement control, memory processes and emotions. Several new groundbreaking technological and conceptual advances have enabled modern neuroscience to meet this huge challenge. Not by chance, the 21st century has been hailed as the Century of the Brain. At the forefront of the effort to understand the brain is the highly multidisciplinary efforts involving neurobiologists, physicists, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and the emergence of a new generation of A la Da-Vinci young renaissance brain researchers. The aim of this session is to expose the recent breakthroughs in brain research, from Brain-Machine interface and understanding sensory processing in health and disease, to the underlying question what makes us human?

Moderator:

Professor Idan Segev, Israel
Chair, The David & Inez Myers in Computational Neuroscience and Member, The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Participants:

Professor Niels Birbaumer, Germany
Professor and Chair, Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, Eberhard-Karls-University, Germany; Adjunct Full Professor of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University; Professor of Neuroscience at the Faculty of Physics, University of Trento, Italy

Dr. Kevan Martin, Switzerland
Co-founder and Co-director, Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zurich, Switzerland; Former Senior Research Fellow, University College, Oxford; Henry Head Research Fellow, Royal Society; Currently Double Professor, University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)

Professor Gal Richter-Levin, Israel
Dean, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Haifa; Head, Haifa Forum for Brain and Behavior; Co-director, Institute for the Study of Affective Neuroscience (ISAN), the University of Haifa

Professor Noam Sobel, Israel
Professor of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute