13th June 2006: "Bending minds - how technology can change who you are"

Martin Westwell is Deputy Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University and an award winning science communicator including being named by The Times and Novartis as the Scientist of the New Century in 1999. Martin started out in organic chemistry at Cambridge University and then moved to Oxford where he discovered neuroscience, the biotech industry and a number of science and society projects including helping to found Cafe Scientifique in Oxford in 2000 and at the Photographers Gallery in central London last year.

Martin will talk about the mind, the brain and how pills to make you smarter, pills to make you forget, electrodes inserted into the brain, and devices to let you control computers just by thinking are all technologies that are with us now or are just around the corner. How do these technologies and the new experiences they bring transform and bend the human mind? How are we going to harness the new technologies to maximise the potential of individuals without sacrificing that individuality? What roles do scientists play in deciding how they are to be implemented?

Come along and join us at 7pm in Blackwells Main Bookshop, Broad Street, Oxford.
No ticket, no booking, no scientific background required.