BSNR Christmas lecture 2022
Thursday 15th December, 6pm
‘The mind’s ear: speech, music and the brain’
Professor Tim Griffiths
Dear friends and colleagues,
As the days get shorter and the mercury starts to drop, there must be one thing in everybody’s mind – Christmas is coming. I am therefore delighted to announce that this year
we have a BSNR Christmas lecture that is in tune with the mood of the festive season. The 2022 Christmas lecture will be delivered by Prof. Tim Griffiths, Professor of Cognitive
Neurology in Newcastle University and Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow. He is a Fellow of Academy of Medical Sciences and an Adjunct Chair in University of Iowa. Prof Griffiths
graduated from University of Oxford and from where he also holds a DM in Neurology. He is an international authority on auditory cognition including musical perception. He has made
many key contributions to both fundamental and applied neuroscience including identification of specific pitch and pitch-sequence systems in auditory cortex using functional imaging.
Prof Griffiths will talk about how the brain constructs a picture of the acoustic world to allow us to understand natural scenes containing speech and music. He will also consider
how this process might go wrong in brain disorders and be relevant to established links between hearing loss and dementia.
Therefore, please put this date in your diaries and join us online on Thursday 15th December at 6pm to enjoy this special BSNR event. You can register for the event here.
Look forward to seeing you there!
Dipayan Mitra
BSNR President
October 2022
Message from the President
Dear friends and colleagues,
It was wonderful to see many of you recently in Liverpool at our Annual Scientific Meeting.
Despite many challenges, which included a rail strike the day before the meeting, Sam Mills
and her team put together a superb programme both in terms of organisation and scientific
content. For many, the highlight of the meeting might have been the talk on pandemics and
infectious diseases by the “Running Mad” Professor Tom Solomon, but what about the run-
through of half a century of evolution of interventional neuroradiology by the Brian Kendall
lecturer Prof Alex Berenstein! The other invited talks and scientific papers were also of very
high quality. This year saw the inaugural parallel Neuroradiographers’ conference, which by
initial feedback, has also been a great success. My thanks to Shubh Biswas for organising the
two-day trainee meeting before the ASM, which continues to go from strength to strength.
So, three cheers to the Liverpool team for making all this happen!
While the ASM remains the highlight of our calendar, many other important activities are
happening throughout the year, thanks to the dedication and hard work of our colleagues in
the various subcommittees and groups. Several of these initiatives have started relatively
recently following a survey done a couple of years ago. This highly successful listening
exercise, conceived and undertaken by my predecessor, Danny Birchall, provided numerous
excellent comments and ideas, and became a springboard to many of the innovations that
followed. As I start my two-year term as President, I would like to ask many of the same
questions to you again, so that we can gauge how far we have come and how we can make
our society even more successful in the future. Harriet Joy, our Hon. Secretary, will be
sending out the link to the survey – please look out for it and make your voice heard. Every
opinion counts!
Last but not least, Christmas is only 7 weeks away and I am delighted to say that we have an
excellent BSNR Christmas lecture lined up for you. The lecture titled ‘The mind’s ear:
speech, music and the brain’ will be given online by Professor Tim Griffiths, Professor of
Cognitive Neurology at Newcastle University on Thursday 15th December at 6pm. I am sure
it will be a fascinating listen, so please tune in.
Till the next update – Cheerio!
Dipayan Mitra
BSNR President
bsnr.pres@gmail.com
November 2022