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To highlight Brain Awareness Week (BAW), the global campaign that supports public understanding and appreciation of neuroscience research, Oxford University is to run Brain Discovery Festival from 9-18th March, an interactive, week-long programme of activities, highlighting its contributions to the field.

Brain Discovery Festival Image credit: Ian Wallman

In collaboration with Oxford Neuroscience, Oxford Sparks, the University’s digital science platform, will host a micro-site packed with learning resources including animations, podcasts, articles, interactive games and lesson plans for teachers. There will also be a series of public events ranging from a ‘left-brain/right-brain’ interactive evening, to a documentary screening of ‘My Love Affair with the Brain,’ at the Ultimate Picture Palace, followed by a panel discussion with neuroscientists.

The programme will be topped off with a Facebook LIVE event which will announce the winner of last year’s Big Brain Competition. Launched as part of the 2017 Brain Diaries exhibition run by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in partnership with Oxford Neuroscience, the competition asked visitors to suggest an idea for a brain experiment to be carried out in an MRI scanner. Selected from over 1,000 entries, the winning experiment was proposed by Richard Harrow. He wanted to find out how the brain makes sense of the voices that we hear and whether it can understand them when the sound is distorted or incomplete. You can watch the experiment as it happens LIVE over Facebook on Friday 16 March.