This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions
Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm and you can join in to the meeting starting at 10:45 am for our open social. Followed by an extended discussion for a half hour. Volunteers please join by 10:30 am.
Freud told us that mental illness came from early childhood trauma or deprivation. After the discovery of effective anti-depressant drugs, and after the revolution in genetics in the 1980’s the pendulum of opinion swung to the idea that the underlying causes were ‘biochemical imbalances’ and ‘bad genes’. However, several decades of investigation have turned up only a few rare bad genes that contribute to mental illness in a few cases.
Now researchers are trying to synthesize these older perspectives and asking again about the effects of early experience, and in particular how different genes might make people more or less reactive and how experience might affect how genes are expressed.
Our featured speaker on this topic will be Dr. Mark Reimers. His talk will survey some of our attempts to understand the causes of mental illness, and summarize the current state-of-art.
Dr. Mark Reimers works as a computational neuroscientist: studying brain function by applying statistical methods to look for patterns in large-scale and high-resolution recordings of brain activity and behavior. He applies these methods to understand normal brain function in memory and to shed light on mental illness.
Dr. Reimers has worked at the US National Institutes of Health, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics in Richmond, and now does research and teaches at Michigan State University. His broader aim is to ground our understanding of feeling and thought in the facts of biology.
Dr. Reimers was the leader of the Richmond Humanists in Virginia for five years, and now leads the UU Forum in Lansing, and speaks frequently at humanist and science outreach events in Michigan.
Please RSVP on meetup to get access to the Zoom link:
https://www.meetup.com/toronto-oasis/events/287124501/
Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!
This meeting has been recorded: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1doPQT-yv8lWNYkHCg_X9QPsg6i772wB4/view?usp=sharing
Find more of our recorded meetings at: https://torontooasis.org/recorded-meetings/