CNH Monthly Roundtable Talk (May) by Prof Muireann Irish
Talk details:
The prospective brain in health and disease
Humans possess the extraordinary capacity not only to remember the past but to anticipate and envisage events that might unfold in the future. Over the past decade, efforts to delineate the cognitive and neural mechanisms of prospection have intensified, leading to identification of a core brain network that supports memory-based constructive endeavours. Dementia syndromes offer a unique opportunity to study how the progressive degeneration of key nodes of this core network impact the capacity for prospection. In particular, the syndrome of semantic dementia has provided compelling insights into the role that semantic memory might play in supporting autobiographical retrieval from the past as well as future-oriented thinking. In this talk, I will provide an overview of key lessons we have learned from studying memory and prospection in the dementias using a combination of novel neuropsychological and cognitive tasks as well as multimodal neuroimaging. In doing so, I hope to highlight the ways in which episodic and semantic representations likely interact in the service of complex expressions of prospection, as well as considering what it might be like to lose these uniquely human functions.
Speaker bio:
Professor Muireann Irish is a cognitive neuroscientist based at FRONTIER, at the Brain & Mind Centre, University of Sydney. Originally from Ireland, Muireann completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin, before relocating to Australia in 2010 and establishing the MIND research team. Muireann has a longstanding interest in the mechanisms that drive cognitive and behavioural changes in younger-onset dementia and how we can use this knowledge to refine our understanding of theoretical models of human memory. To date, Muireann has produced 150 peer-reviewed publications in some of the top tier journals in the field including Brain, Nature Reviews Neurology, Human Brain Mapping, and PNAS. Her work has been cited over 8000 times and she has secured >$6million in competitive funding as CI. The quality of Muireann’s research has been recognised by prestigious awards from almost every major society in the field, including the 2020 Elizabeth Warrington Prize from the British Neuropsychological Society, and the 2020 Gottschalk Medal from the Australian Academy of Science. Muireann is the current President of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Neuroscience and a keen advocate for women in STEM. Her two greatest achievements are her sons, Fionn and OisÃn.
Email: muireann.irish@sydney.edu.au
Twitter:@Muireann_Irish