Author: Nick

Recently the Memory Network’s Principal Investigator Sebastian Groes travelled to Malaysia to forge links with Malaysia’s UKM university, and to start a South-East Asian branch of the AHRC-funded project. Groes taught and lectured during his visit to University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and set up two memory-related projects with colleagues there. The first is a health awareness project, ‘Biographies of Kuala Lumpur’, which centres on a biopsychosocial mapping of one of South-East Asia’s most successful cities, Kuala Lumpur (‘KL’). This project is particularly interested in how memory and self-perception are implicated in obesity, one of the greatest health threats in the West and in Malaysia. Simultaneously, Groes and colleagues kick-started a cultural memory research project focusing on Kuala Lumpur and its cultural and social heritage. For this project, “KL: Visions and Voices of the City”, UKM students have started creating a collective psychogeography of the city on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kl.visionsvoices

Saturday, 23rd March, 7pm

Museum of London

With: Will Self (Writer); Hugo Spiers (Neuroscience, University College London); Sebastian Groes (English Literature, University of Roehampton)

The three-year memorisation of London’s streets undertaken by black cab drivers, ‘The Knowledge’, has an extraordinary effect on the brain’s ability to navigate. Research into this phenomenon informs Will Self’s novel The Book of Dave. The Memory Network invited Self to participate in new research, which included the neuroimaging of his brain. At this Memory Network event, Self talks about his experience and neuroscientist Hugo Spiers talks about the role London plays in his work. Together with Sebastian Groes they discuss the relationship between neuroscience and literature, and the effects of new technologies on our memory.

This event is free, but requires a reservation. To sign up, please write to memorynetwork@roehampton.ac.uk with the subject line ‘Ways of London’.