As I mentioned in a comment some weeks ago on Andrew Sutton’s Conductive
World blog –
I was grateful to be reminded of the posting I wrote in March 2011 about
an afternoon of presentations that had impressed so much that I am going to try
the same method in a presentation of my own.
I have decided to re-publish the posting as I think it is quite
appropriate as those who will be attending and speaking at the 8th
World Congress in Munich will be preparing their presentations.
Saturday 12th
March 2011
BrainWEEK
Part One
I am sitting in
the weak sunshine, feeling absolutely amazed by the experience that I have had
this afternoon. Here in the late afternoon sun on the terrace of one of
Nürnberg’s hospitals, Klinikum Süd, I am able to recap on all I heard in the
past three hours, read through my notes and ponder a little.
I am not
allowed to switch on my computer in the hospital; otherwise I would be posting
this immediately to capture some of the on-the-spot enthusiasm that I have. I
hope that it will still shine through later when I write up my notes.
I have just
listened, for free, courtesy of Nürnberg’s Tower of the Senses Museum and
BrainWEEK, to sixteen doctors and professors from the different clinics of
Nürnberg’s main hospitals. They were talking about anything and everything to
do with neurology.
One question at
the end of the second of the three one-hour sessions was “Why are you only
mentioning how the brain is influenced by medicine, or trauma, etc., and not
touching on our emotions?” The quick answer was “Because this is BrainWEEK!”
Not one of the doctors denied that medicine and therapies, lifestyle, activity,
social contact with people, all played important roles in our health, but as
they said, it is the brain that is the international topic of discussion
this week.
First we were
treated to talks by psychologists and consultants from the psychology and
psychiatric departments who explained about their work with Alzheimer’s,
dementia, depression, anti-depressive medicines and the real personality of
sleep! (Or indeed lack of it).
In the second
session child and youth psychologists and neurologists from the field of
psychosomatics and psychotherapy were talking about concentration disorders,
Autism and Asperger’s, the treatments and therapies for traumatic experiences,
hyperactivity, and burnout and pain memory.
In the final
session we heard from neurologists, psychologists and a neurosurgeon discussing
nicotine addiction, doping, surgery in the brain, remembering and forgetting,
training the memory.
I came away
reassured
Amongst these
wonderful speakers, these doctors who all told us about the use of
pharmaceutical medicine in their therapies and treatments of patients, there
was not one who did not promote the importance in support of their use drugs,
of psychotherapy, sport, diet, lifestyle and social conditions, communication,
motivation and activity on our well-being.
I felt quite at
home.
There was not
one doctor who claimed to know what was going on inside our
heads but they had a lot of experience amongst them and could tell us quite
a lot about how they work to try to normalise disturbances in the well-being of
their patients.
They know about
the chemical reactions at synapses and now some drugs can have positive and
some negative effects on this. They explained about the uses of
anti-depressants and anti-epileptic drugs and the results that they and their
patients experience.
The concluding
questions and answers brought us to the fact that despite tremendous leaps
forwards in the study of the brain in recent years we still do not know very
much. One doctor said that what we know now is hardly scratching the
surface of what is happening in our brains and it is impossible to predict
whether over the next hundreds of years much more will be discovered. He said
the scientists know about the influences and benefits that certain drugs and
therapies can have on certain disturbances in the brain and the influences that
they have on the ability of patients to live a normal life, but he made it absolutely
clear to us that the researchers and neurologists are working on the tip of
a huge iceberg. He said that at the moment there is nothing to indicate
that the knowledge of what is going on inside our skulls will get any deeper.
I really was
good to soak up so much information in such a short time, and be enthused by
such knowledgeable and jolly people. It was almost like a party atmosphere with
hundreds of people crammed in to a room that was far too small for the
occasion. We were perched on the window-sills and sitting on the floor in the
aisles until someone decided to leave and a chair became free. I did not leave
my seat once, having eventually got one, the quality of the talks just got
better and better and I did not want to miss a thing.
Pecha Kucha
The afternoon
had been organised using a method from Japan called Pecha Kucha. Each
speaker had twenty slides; each slide was up on the screen for just twenty
seconds. It was so easy for them to time their speech to the slides and in not
one of the fifteen cases was the gong needed. This meant that there was plenty
of time for the discussion at the end of each session and time to get a drink
too.
We could
perhaps learn something from this for future conductive congresses.
I sat a bit
longer in the sun and thought about what I had heard before it was time to go
off in search of the next venue for some more BrainWEEK action.
Off to
Casablanca
Part two
follows tomorrow
PS
One of the
questions put to the doctors was “What can we do in our lives, through our
diet, to increase our well-being”. They were in total agreement that eating
bananas for the tryptophan and chocolate for the serotonin was a good place to
start, but none of them were prepared to say how much chocolate we should eat!
Notes
BrainWEEK-
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