Description

The Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) has organized a symposium "Twee Talen - één beTalen" (or in English "Two Languages, get one for free”) on Friday, 20 May 2011 to address recent developments on multilingualism and multilingual language acquisition. Importantly, the symposium is open to and directed towards the general public, for instance parents who (plan to) raise their children with more than one language. What is the best way to achieve this goal? Are there different strategies to do this? What is important to keep in mind? Is it a bad sign if a child mixes languages and switches from one language to the other, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or is this rather a normal, healthy step in the development? Do I ask too much of my child when I raise it with two (or even more) languages? Practical questions like these will be answered and discussed, and the speakers will give some advice about the do’s and don’ts in multilingual language acquisition. This symposium will deal with topics such as multilingual processing and the underlying areas of the brain that are involved when one is proficient in more than one language.

Description:

The Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) will organize, on 18 March 2010, the symposium “Sleep(less) in Leiden” to address recent developments in sleep research.  Since ancient times it is known that sleep is of paramount importance for normal human physical, cognitive and emotional functioning, but only recently science has become able to study normal sleep and sleep abnormalities in much more detail. 
Has this progress led to a better understanding of our biological clock and modern disturbances like the ‘jet lag’ or the old fashioned ‘lying awake’ ?  Is there a relation between sleep and memory?  Learning during sleep, a dream? What can science tell us about dreaming?  Is it essential to our functioning or can we do without?

Description:

The Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) will organize, on 20 March 2009, the symposium “Imag(in)ing the Buddhist Brain” to address recent developments in this area, among them the question: What claims do meditation traditions make, and are the results of meditation measurable?

Is brain research beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries, namely that mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness? Such transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers working with Tibetan monks have been working toward translating those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination.