2121 is Susan Greenfield's first novel and is informed by her experience as a neuroscientist.  According to this review in The Guardian it is her scientific work in another wrapper and all the worse for being so.

I'm not terribly interested in the novel but I did enjoy hearing her air her views on how the brain's great plasticity is reacting to new technologies and about her work on Alzheimer's.  In response to questions about how to keep dementia at bay she suggested exercising the brain by vigorous debate could be helpful.  Afterwards, gathered round a table outside, I heard a group doing just that.  Their debate was about how much rubbish Susan Greenfield had just expounded.

I followed the brain theme at a lecture by Suzanne Corkin.  She worked for over 40 years with a chap who had large chunks of his brain chopped off in an attempt to cure his epilepsy.  It did help with the seizures but the downside was that he essentially lost his ability to remember anything.

His loss was science's gain.  He became a very willing collaborator in numerous experiments aimed at gaining an understanding of how memory works.  He continues to help post mortem having allowed his brain to be sliced into over 2000 sections for further study.

Permanent Present Tense, Suzanne's book about the work is one I will definitely borrow from the library.  If I remember.

It's common currency that signals from the brain control movements of the body but no-one has as yet satisfactorily answered the question of who, what or how the signals are decided upon.  It's all in the mind.  Well what's that when it's at home?

You can't see it but you can see it at work.  In choreography for example.  All sorts of strange signals are flowing from brain to muscle in the Booking Dance Festival Showcase, in which half a dozen US dance groups give a taster of their work.

That work varies from the pretty pictures made by free-flowing colour soaked costumed dancers through jerky urban encounters accompanied by a heavy beat to a spotlit Mr Universe type rippling his muscles.  It's well worth seeing.

Music and art are other mind body phenomena and they came together last night at The National Gallery of Modern Art in Martin Kershaw's Hero as Riddle.  This is music inspired by the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, some of which is only yards away from where the music was being played.

A short cacophonous introduction that made me think of Paolozzi's jumbling together of disparate elements is followed by an eight piece suite and images of the artworks that inspired each piece were projected behind the ten man band as they played.   The music is a riot of colours, tones and tempos reaching high and plunging low.  It's at times stirring and at times restful but never less than absorbing.

Alas like the sax gig I was at the previous night it's a one-off and it's five years since it was last played so you'd be best searching out the CD rather than wait for  a reprise.