The Society for Neuroscience ran a video contest for Brain Awareness Week and announced the winner on Saturday, before the Presidential Special Lecture at SfN 2011.
The winning video, “The Treasure Hunt,” journeys through the loss of a person’s ability to speak or understand spoken or written language, a condition called aphasia. Aphasia is caused by disease, or injury to the brain. In the video, it is caused by a stroke.
The video’s creator, Shiree Heath, a graduate student from the University of Queensland‘s Language Neuroscience Laboratory, used animation to tell the story of a child’s quest to discover how his granddad “lost” his words. Equipped with a “treasure map” (the brain), his “hunt” explains how the brain processes language and how that process is “buried” in aphasia.
“Entering the competition was an opportunity to provide accessible information about aphasia, particularly for children,” Heath said. “Aphasia is a common and devastating consequence of stroke, but public awareness is low relative to other conditions with similar prevalence, such as multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease.”
To watch the second and third place videos, please click here.
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