Between March 13 and 18, 2023, the Laboratory of Clinical Cognitive Sciences of the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences, will organize a series of workshops and lectures during the Brain Development Awareness Week.

With the support of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, the Laboratory of Clinical Cognitive Sciences has prepared a week full of discussions with experts from fields such as psychology, biology and neuroscience, open to the general public.

Mental Awareness Week Program

Workshops and lectures will include topics from biology, psychology, neurology and biochemistry. The events will take place both on-site (Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences on Panduri Street) and online on the Laboratory of Clinical Cognitive Sciences Facebook page and its channel Youtube. Participation is free.

Some of the main guests and the topics they will be covering

• Nootropic Peptides and Memory: Implications for Alzheimer’s Disease Prevention – Dr. Stefan Šedlacek
• Specialized research shows that nootropic peptides have various applications in therapeutic practice, for example, they improve the speed of information processing or have an anti-inflammatory effect. A growing body of evidence suggests that nootropic peptides are also linked to memory processing associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
• About what nootropic peptides are and about the mechanisms by which they modulate mnestic functions, as well as how biochemistry interacts with cognitive psychology and how this aspect is reflected in the approach to this complex neurocognitive disorder, we will have the opportunity to learn from Dr. Shedlacek, a guest with experience in this field.

Dr. Stefan Shedlacek is the coordinator of the Department of Enzymology at the Institute of Biochemistry of the Romanian Academy. During his academic career, he conducted research at the University of Illinois (United States of America), as well as at the Institute of Biochemistry of the University of Kiel or the Max Planck Institutes for Biochemistry and Biophysics (Germany). Dr. Shedlacek recently contributed to a Fulbright research fellowship at the prestigious Anderson MD Cancer Research Center, an affiliate of the University of Texas (USA).

Review of emotional disorders – Conf. Univ. Dr. Dragoš Čirneči

Dragoš Cerneči is a doctor of psychology specializing in neuroscience.

He has taught at Tibiscus Universities in Timisoara, Babes-Boiai Universities in Cluj, Bucharest University, and is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences at Spiru Haret University. For almost 10 years, he worked as a researcher at the Romanian Academy, and since 2016 he is a researcher at the International Center for Research and Education in Creative Technologies (CINETic) – a laboratory of cognitive development and applied psychology through immersion experience.

In 2004, he published the first book on developmental neuroscience in Romania (Unmasking the century: What Makes Our Brains), and later three other books: Origin of the mind; From Viruses to Beliefs (2013), Stress from Our Minds and War from the World of Cells (2014) and The Brain of Homo Sapiens; User Guide (2016). In 2010, he conducted the first neuromarketing study in Romania, and in 2009-2013, the first brain training exercises available in stores in Romania.

About the lecture

Ancient philosophers and doctors believed that the human mind is a collection of mental faculties. Mental faculties have changed their names over the millennia, but they usually include categories such as perception, thinking (called cognition in psychology), feeling (or emotion), and will (i.e., action). These mental categories represent a narrative of the history of human nature in Western philosophy, in which emotion (our inner beast) and cognition (the crown of evolution) fight or cooperate with each other to control behavior.

The past two decades of neuroscience research have led us to a paradigm shift in our understanding of how the brain works, setting the stage for a revolution in our understanding of what emotions actually are and how they work.

Thus, it was found that emotions are not a reflection of the activity of some primitive areas of the brain (such as the amygdala), but appear in the most developed and interconnected networks of the neocortex, being some complex constructions created by the same complex mechanisms. which have a role to remind us, plan, make decisions and generally control behavior, called executive functions, and which have an allostatic role.

Emotional disorders always go “together” with cognitive ones, such as attention, memory, decisions, as well as with motor ones, and they reflect not the inability of the mind to control impulses, but dysfunctions of the mechanisms that form the image of the environment in the brain. the world and our actions in relation to it.

Neurobiology of pain – prof. university Dr. Alexander Babesh

Alexandru Babes is a professor of neuroscience and physiology at the Faculty of Biology at the University of Bucharest.

The laboratory he heads studies the peripheral nervous system, the sensory neurons with which we feel pain and the temperature of the environment. He has published more than thirty scientific articles in international peer-reviewed journals. He has co-authored research published in Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Journal of Neuroscience, Pain, and Journal of Physiology.

Since 1995, he has completed numerous scientific internships in Germany, France, Great Britain and Spain. He was a fellow of the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and received the “Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel” research award from it in 2019. In 2018, he was awarded the “Nicolae Simionescu” award of the Romanian Academy. He was president of the National Research Council in 2011–2012 and 2020–2022. He is a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy.

About the presentation:

Humanity’s need to relieve pain is as old as our species, but our attempts to understand it only began with Aristotle, who considered pain a passion of the soul, thus emphasizing its affective dimension. In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes proposed a purely physiological approach to pain: signals passing through hard nerve fibers affect a hypothetical pain center in the brain, triggering reflexes designed to protect the body. This relatively simple model assumes a direct relationship between the severity of tissue damage and the intensity of pain.

Yet observations accumulated over time contradict this linear model: on the one hand, there are serious injuries that are not accompanied by pain, and on the other hand, many people complain of pain in the absence of any noticeable physical damage. To explain these paradoxical manifestations, the famous gate control theory was proposed in the 1960s, which paved the way for the modern understanding of pain. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded, in particular, for the discovery of key molecules in pain signaling.

The presentation will summarize the long and winding path from Aristotle’s ideas to modern pain molecules.