• Question: What would the benefits of your work be to humans/or animals

    Asked by hazzza69 to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 8 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by l300z35.
    • Photo: Michael Craig

      Michael Craig answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      My work looks at ways to improve memory, especially in people who have bad problems with their memory such as people with Alzheimer’s disease. So far we have found that we can improve memory in young people. old people and people with Alzheimer’s by asking them to have a short period of rest after learning something new.

      In people with Alzheimer’s we see a huge benefit in their memory where they sometimes remember over 80% more information than if they perform some form of activity immediately after learning something new. This could have huge benefits to people who have Alzheimer’s and people who are in the early stages who we say have amnesic Mild Cognitive Impairment (or aMCI for short).

      People with Alzheimer’s also often get lost easily, especially in new places that they haven’t been before. One of my experiments is looking to see whether our short period of rest after learning can help someone find their way through a new environment. To do this I’m using a game software which allows me to build a virtual environment where the person taking part controls their movement through the maze. You can see a picture of one of the virtual environments on my profile.

      My work is still in its early stages but we hope it could be of huge benefit to people who have problems with their memory.

    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      My research is important for people with dyslexia who might well read several words in every word or confuse words, and trying to understand how this happens may help us develop ways of printing or reading words that can stop this happening. Dyslexia affects an awful lot of people and I hope it can help in some way.

      It’s also possible that this research can help us understand where in the brain these words are thought of which can help us understand how brain damage or epilepsy for example affects reading, or whether brain surgery is going to stop someone from being able to read or speak.

    • Photo: James Stovold

      James Stovold answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      My work is quite different from the other scientists in the brain zone, as I’m just using the brain as a method of controlling robots. However, the work I’m doing is looking at how we can get multiple groups of robots to work in the same area without affecting each other. This would mean that, by sending in lots of robots, we could find survivors in wrecks and collapsed buildings without endangering further lives by sending people in to search.

    • Photo: Ben Brilot

      Ben Brilot answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I’m involved of various pieces of work that have lots of different goals in who they aim to help:
      1. The major piece of work is looking at how we can establish and measure emotion states in animals. This idea is that you end up with good scientific arguments for how people should be looking after their animals (that includes farmers, scientists and anyone who has a pet).

      2. Part of the above is trying to understand why emotions exist in the first place, why did they evolve, how do they help us survive, and why do they go wrong sometimes and people end up with mental health problems (things like major depression). I’m currently trying to get a project off the ground looking at why people with anxiety hate not knowing things: this is called ‘intolerance of uncertainty’ and means that they find it really stressful being in situations where they don’t know what’s going to happen or how safe they are. We’d really like to look at this in people with autism, since anxiety plays a big part in affecting how distressing they find day-to-day life.

      I have a few other projects too, but I think that’ll do for now. Just to echo what Michael said below: these are all things in their early stages, so it’ll be a while before we can bring those benefits to people/animals. But that’s actually a general theme in science: it takes a long time for an idea to become research, then others have to accept that research (and ideally copy it to prove to themselves that it’s true), then finally it starts to filter into the ‘real world’ where the benefits can be felt.

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