Come witness young students perform brain surgery for the first time

This Saturday, February 21st twenty CEGEP students will meet at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro, at McGill University and the MUHC for a unique chance-to test their skills at ‘brain’ surgery. These students were prize winners at the Bench to Bedside Conference for Youth 2015 - geared at stimulating student career interests in medicine, surgery and medical research.

Years ago, children were warned that smoking could stunt their growth, but now a major study by an international team including the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University and the University of Edinburgh shows new evidence that long-term smoking could cause thinning of the brain’s cortex. The cortex is the outer layer of the brain in which critical cognitive functions such as memory, language and perception take place. Interestingly, the findings also suggest that stopping smoking helps to restore at least part of the cortex’s thickness.

 Study has far-reaching implications for unconscious role of infant experiences on adult development

An infant’s mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later even if the child totally stops using the language, (as can happen in cases of international adoption) according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital - The Neuro and McGill University’s Department of Psychology. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the “lost” language remain in the brain.

<p>Video: <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/channels/%3Ca%20href%3D"http://youtu.be/kIuXn31RmiM">http://youtu.be/kIuXn31RmiM</a></p>">http://youtu.be/kIuXn31RmiM">http://youtu.be/kIuXn31RmiM</a></p>

Video: http://youtu.be/kIuXn31RmiM

In a new study, published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, researchers show for the first time how the brain re-wires and fine-tunes its connections differently depending on the relative timing of sensory stimuli. In most neuroscience textbooks today, there is a widely held model that explains how nerve circuits might refine their connectivity based on patterned firing of brain cells, but it has not previously been directly observed in real time.

Dr. Robert J.