DOORS 7PM | SPEAKER 7.30PM

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Catherine Hall is Professor of Neurovascular Stuff (Psychology) in the School of Psychology and Sussex Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and a Professorial Research Fellow at University College London in the British Heart Foundation and UK Dementia Research Institute’s Centre for Vascular Dementia Research. She researches how the brain’s blood vessels work, what happens to brain cells when they don’t get enough blood, and why some parts of the brain go wrong faster than others when they don’t. Her lab images blood vessels in the living brain to watch blood flow and energy use as they happen.

• 7:00pm Doors open, bar opens
• 7:30pm Talk starts
• 8:15pm approx Short break followed by Q+A
• 9:00pm Event ends

In this talk, Prof. Hall takes us on a journey through the brain’s 400 miles of blood vessels.

Thinking really is hungry work: an adult brain is 2% of the body’s mass but burns around 20% of its energy at rest. It is also a remarkably efficient machine — it manages on roughly the power of a dim lightbulb, where a supercomputer doing comparable work needs a small power station. Most of that energy goes on one job: pumping ions back across the membranes of nerve cells after they fire.

Prof. Hall explains how the brain keeps that demand matched to the oxygen arriving in its blood, helped by the pericytes wrapped around its tiniest blood vessels— and what happens when the match fails. She then makes the case that this matters for dementia. The hippocampus, one of the first regions damaged in Alzheimer’s disease, seems to run closer to its energetic limits than the rest of the brain and copes badly when oxygen falls, and risk factors for dementia stack up to squeeze its supply further. Worse, the beta amyloid that accumulates in Alzheimer’s appears to lower brain oxygen itself, raising the prospect of a vicious cycle. The talk closes on the question her lab is chasing now: if a failing energy supply helps start the disease, could protecting blood flow help stop it?