Recap: January Science Cafe on Mirror Neurons










Costa Mesa, CA (PRWEB) January 26, 2006

The following is a recap of the most anticipated event this Group has devised in the short span of about 6 months. It was held on the topic of Mirror Neurons, and featured Dr. Marco Iacoboni of the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA. It’s estimated that 55 people attended, and we had a standing-room-only crowd.

We held this “premiere” Science Cafe event on Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 3:00 PM. It was held on the upper floor of the Barnes & Noble next door to South Coast Plaza next to their in-store Cafe. We would like to thank Diane Roth, Community Relations Manager at the store — and the store — for their generous hospitality and support of The Science Cafe.

Our host, Brian Hart, got the event started with a short, 5-minute presentation that introduced the purpose of The Science Cafe. Brian also took a moment to highlight some upcoming Science Cafe events, such as a Visitor Night at the UCI Observatory, and a wine-and-dinner event featuring the ancient Maya people, and archaeologist, Jorge Vasquez. As The Science Cafe is a program of Sigma Xi — The Scientific Research Society — Brian then introduced the presidents of the two local chapters.

President of the Orange County chapter, Stan White, Ph.D., was on hand to talk about the OC Sigma Xi chapter’s bi-monthly lecture and dinner series, and UCI Professor, Frederick Wan — president of the UC Irvine chapter of Sigma Xi, was on hand to explain more about Sigma Xi as an organization as well as highlight innovation by UC Irvine. We then viewed a 15-minute clip from the new PBS series, NOVA scienceNOW, on “Mirror Neurons.” This led to a 30-minute presentation on the subject by our featured speaker, Dr. Marco Iacoboni. Iacoboni is Associate Professor in the Neuropsychiatric Institute, and Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Simulation Lab, in the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. During the talk, the attendees had many questions for our speaker and at one point there was a spirited discussion taking place with the audience and speaker going back and forth, asking questions and with Iacoboni providing new insights.

It was indeed a wonderful thing to see that we could stick to a planned schedule in the light that this subject ignited an interesting discussion regarding recent developments in the study of this discovery in recent years. Ccome join us coming up this March, for “March OC Sigma Xi: Wine, Dinner, and the Mayans,” when we learn about the ancient Mayan culture from archaeologist and civil engineer, Jorge Vasquez.

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