Our Brain – The Making and Breaking of Memories | Catalyst Kōrero

Our brain’s ability to learn, store and retrieve information can easily be taken for granted, at least until those times when our memory system fails us.

And for millennia, how this happens – or doesn’t – has been a mystery, neuroscientist Distinguished Prof Cliff Abraham says.

But over the last 50 years, neuroscience researchers have developed “a very good, if still incomplete, understanding of how memories are formed in the brain, from early in life right through ageing.”

Prof Abraham’s Catalyst Kōrero on May 15 will cover how memories are formed in the brain under normal conditions – and how memory storage and retrieval are impaired during stress, neurological disease and injury. Plus, what we can do to maintain our “well-oiled memory machine”.

Prof Abraham, a psychology professor at the University of Otago, is a member of the renowned longitudinal Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study research team and Otago’s Brain Health Research Centre. He is also a co-lead of the Aotearoa Brain Project. He was awarded the Marsden Medal for his lifetime service to science in 2022.

Thursday, May 15, 6 to 7:30 pm, at The Rees Hotel Queenstown. Registration required to ensure your seat. Please bring cash for your koha, which will be given to the Queenstown branch of Alzheimer’s Society Otago