UCL Institute of Neurology

30 November 2011

We report, with great sadness, the death on 28 November of Jon Driver, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, and one of the world’s leading psychologists and neuroscientists.

Source: Alzheimer’s Research UK Press Release

UCL Institute of Neurology PhD student, Hannah Golden, is embarking on a project to understand the causes of hearing problems in Alzheimer’s disease, thanks to an £88,000 grant from Alzheimer’s Research UK, the UK’s leading dementia research charity. It’s hoped the study, which is the one of the first of its kind, could improve diagnosis and lead to new ways of helping patients cope with their symptoms.

 A study published in Neuron last week, conducted at UCL's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, shows that the conventional view of how our brains learn has to be revisited. Previously, it was thought that the dopaminergic inputs that the ventral striatum receives from mid-brain structures signal a reward prediction error which facilitates learning from rewards. However, the study conducted by Miriam Klein-Flugge, Tim Behrens and colleagues, found that in situations where learning does not depend on rewards, the ventral striatal signal flexibly adapts and instead reflects a behaviourally relevant teaching signal, while the mid-brain still encodes the classic reward prediction error.

31 October 2011

We are pleased to report that at the recent Institute of Medical Illustrators annual conference the prestigious Wellcome Image Award 2011 was presented to Robert Ludlow, medical photographer at the joint UCL Institute of Neurology and UCLH National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery Medical Illustration Unit. Robert’s stunning image “Intracranial recording for epilepsy” shows the surface of a patient’s brain during surgery at the UCLH National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. Derek Tutssel, Head of the Medical Illustration Unit, also received a Bronze Award from the Institute for his operative image.