Renowned brain scientist to speak in Sisters

The Sisters Science Club will host a presentation by renowned brain scientist Dr. Arthur Toga on Monday, November 7, at the FivePine Conference Center.

Dr. Toga is director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) at the University of California (UCLA). He is a world expert in research of the human brain in healthy and diseased states. The presentation will begin at 7 p.m., and the public is invited.

One of the greatest mysteries of the human being is how the brain works. Dr. Toga has led a team of researchers on a massive, years-long quest that has provided many answers to this puzzle, in particular the differences between a normal and an abnormal brain.

Using MRI brain scanners, Dr. Toga and his colleagues began their research by taking various images of normal human brains. It took them 25 years and scans from 20,000 people. Because every brain is different in some ways, establishing a baseline required defining what a "normal" brain is. For the purposes of this study, they defined "normal" as brains of people in good health, from 5 to 85 years old. The result is a statistical atlas of a normal brain that can now be used as a comparison with unhealthy brains afflicted with schizophrenia, dementia, multiple sclerosis, ageing, memory loss, or drug abuse.

Dr. Toga's LONI Human Brain Atlas is now accepted and used all over the world.

In his presentation, Dr. Toga will show and describe the normal human brain, how it changes as children grow into the teenage years and then into adulthood, as well as the changes related to aging. He will discuss which components of the brain are inherited and which parts change most as a result of learning and education. Finally, he will show the changes in the brain associated with Alzheimer's disease, as well as autism.

Dr. Toga is coming to make this presentation at the request of Dr. Bob Collins, a resident of Sisters and formerly chairman of the Dept. of Neurology at UCLA. Dr. Collins is president of the Sisters Science Club.