Functional Neuroanatomy Course: Visceral Mind (Summer School)

About This Course

1-5 September 2025

Visceral Mind is a functional neuroanatomy course, intended for:

postgraduate, postdoctoral and early career researchers studying cognitive neuroscience and related disciplines.
clinical, medical and allied health practitioners with membership of an overseeing professional or statutory body.

Why study this course?

Functional neuroanatomy is taught in the context of neurological patients with impairments due to focal brain lesions, and hands-on neuroanatomy classes with human brain tissue – to bring neuroanatomy to life and make it relevant to students of cognitive neuroscience.

How long does this course take to complete?

1-5 September 2025

Visceral Mind is an annual 5 day residential Summer School delivered on our Bangor campus and surrounding area.

Registration includes:

6 nights accommodation (B&B) in en suite rooms at Bangor University
Course & Bench fees including patient conference, brain dissection and lectures
Conference dinner, lunches and refreshments
North Wales Excursion

Course Cost

Residential - TBC
Non-residential - TBC

Visceral Mind Tutors

Oliver Turnbull, Professor of Neuropsychology

Programme lead for The Visceral Mind

Prof Turnbull has long standing interest teaching neuroanatomy through drawing, and also painting, brains. His research interests are in emotion and its many consequences for mental life. These include: the neuropsychology of emotion regulation, emotion-based learning and ‘intuition’; the role of emotion in false beliefs, preserved emotion-based learning after amnesia; and the neuroscience of psychotherapy. He is the author of a number of scientific articles on these topics, and (together with Mark Solms) of the popular science text ‘The Brain and the Inner World’. He is a Professor of Neuropsychology in Bangor University, where he is also Deputy Vice-Chancellor.

Oliver Turnbull's Staff Profile

Richard Binney

Deputy Programme Lead for The Visceral Mind

Richard is a Senior Lecturer at Bangor University. He is a neuropsychologist/neuroscientist who researches the way the human brain stores and uses our knowledge of people, objects, and words. He has particular interests in frontotemporal networks. Further, he tries to understand how these abilities break down following brain injury or disease (e.g., in dementia). He uses behavioural measures such as reaction times, accuracy scores and subjective ratings, in parallel with brain imaging and brain stimulation techniques.

Richard Binney’s Staff Profile

Alan Watson

Reader in Anatomy and Neuroscience, Cardiff University

My main research focus has been on synapse distribution on physiologically characterized neurons in both invertebrates (neuroethology) and vertebrates (spinal sensory afferents). I have also worked on normal ageing in spinal circuitry. In a parallel existence I study the physiological basis of music making and have written a book on the Biology of Musical Performance. I teach gross anatomy, neuroanatomy and neuroscience to medical and science students, and performance physiology and injury prevention to music students and those who treat them, as well as giving many public lectures on related topics. It’s all connected... yes, really!

Nils Muhlert, Manchester University

Nils is a cognitive neuroscientist and lecturer at the University of Manchester. His work examines how alterations in brain structure and function in people with MS relates to the emergence of cognitive impairment. More recently he's been carrying out experiments to make people feel stressed, to see what that does to them and why. He's usually a nice person though, honest! Nils has been teaching neuroanatomy for over 20 years, getting hooked after his first brain dissection class.

Nils Muhlert's Staff Profile

Michel Thiebaut de Schotten, L’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière

Michel is Director of Research at CNRS, Chair of the Organization for Human brain mapping (4000 neuroimaging members), Editor in Chief of the peer review journal Brain Structure & Function, ERC Consolidator Grantee, and Head of the Department of Neurofunctional Imaging in Bordeaux (GIN) and the Brain Connectivity Behaviour laboratory in Paris (BCBlab). His work that includes >100 peer review articles on brain connectivity from novel neuroimaging methodologies to experimental work to theory. Critically, he dedicates significant effort toward the clinical translation of his work through an open model approach that makes his tools freely accessible to the community. He developed the BCBtoolkit software suite, a set of programs for computing disconnections made freely available to the scientific and clinical communities. Recently, he has explored the role of white matter connections in the definition of functional areas. His most recent findings reaffirm a basic premise of neurobiology, i.e., that brain connectivity defines the function and provides a reliable tool for segmenting the cortex into meaningful units to study development and disease in living subjects. Most recently, he published his first Atlas of the function of white matter as well as a new software the functionnectome that unravel the contribution of white matter circuits to function.

Cathryn Roberts, Consultant Clinical Neuropsychologist, North Wales Brain Injury Service

Cathryn is a Consultant Neuropsychologist working at the North Wales Brain Injury Service (NWBIS) and has worked in neuropsychology services within the National Health Service for many years. In her current role, she is the clinical lead of an interdisciplinary community neurorehabilitation team for people living with acquired brain injury across north Wales. Cathryn is passionate about supporting people with a brain injury to adjust, optimise their functioning and improve their quality of life through evidence-based rehabilitation. As part of her role, she also offers specialist neuropsychological assessment and consultation, as well as teaching and training of students and professionals. In addition, she has a research background in the neuropsychology of emotion and a special interest in working with families post-brain injury.

Martyn Bracewell, Bangor University, Neurologist & Academic

Martyn Bracewell is a Senior Lecturer in Behavioural Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Wolfson Institute for Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience at Bangor University, and a Consultant Neurologist at the Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Liverpool and the North Wales Brain Injury Service. He read Medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford and has a PhD in Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include the motor and cognitive functions of the cerebellum and basal ganglia.

Martyn Bracewell’s staff profile

Guillaume Thierry, Bangor University, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

He is mainly interested in the processing of meaning by the human brain, i.e. semantic integration, and a range of related themes, such as verbal/non-verbal dissociations, visual object recognition, colour perception, functional cerebral asymmetry, language-emotion interactions, language development, developmental dyslexia and bilingualism. He has received funding form the BBSRC, the ESRC, the AHRC, the European Research Council and the British Academy to investigate semantic integration using behavioural measurements, event-related brain potentials, eye-tracking and functional neuroimaging in various populations and contexts. He also has a track record of knowledge transfer in Health & Safety, Environmental Protection, and Global Well-Being by means of public lectures, workshops, and immersive theatrical events (Cognisens, Cerebellium).

Guillaume Thierry’s staff profile

Rudi Coetzer

Rudi Coetzer is the Clinical Director of The Disabilities Trust, UK, and an Honorary Professor in the School of Human & Behavioural Sciences at Bangor University, Wales. He previously worked as a Consultant Neuropsychologist and Head of Service in the National Health Service for more than two decades. He is on the BPS Specialist Register of Clinical Neuropsychologists.

Kami Koldewyn

Dr. Koldewyn’s core interests are in social development and how we perceive, attend to, remember, and understand social information. She’s particularly interested in how brain regions that are involved in social processing are tuned across development, and how the function and connectivity of these regions may be altered in disorders that affect social abilities. She leads the ‘Developmental Social Vision Lab’ at Bangor University, whose approach combines implicit and explicit measures of social perception, social attention, and social learning as well as structural and functional brain imaging. She is a Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience as well as co-director of research for the College of Human Sciences at Bangor University.

Kami Koldewyn’s Staff Profile

Course Content

What will you study on this course?

There is no substitute for the life-changing experience of dissecting the human brain, and no better way to learn, by both sight and touch, the three-dimensional brain. This course is intended for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers studying cognitive neuroscience. Functional neuroanatomy is taught in the context of neurological patients with impairments due to focal brain lesions, and hands-on neuroanatomy classes with human brain tissue – to bring neuroanatomy to life and make it relevant to students of cognitive neuroscience.

We begin with case conferences in which patients with neurological signs of lesion to a system or pathway are interviewed and examined, and in which the techniques of neurological examination and principles of localization are highlighted. The patient's scans will be reviewed for clinic-anatomical correlation relating signs and symptoms to radiological anatomy. In the dissection lab, students will gain a 3D familiarity with brain structure, by sight and touch, to be correlated with what they see in case conferences and scan reviews.

The Visceral Mind Summer School Programme will include:

A group of people in a Visceral Mind class

Hands-on Brain anatomy sessions

Including, examination of prosections of the whole brain and hemisphere, skull, meninges & vasculature. Everyone will have the opportunity for hands on brain dissection and special dissection techniques.

Patient Case conferences

Functional neuroanatomy is taught in the context of neurological patients with impairments due to focal brain lesions – and in which the techniques of neurological examination and principles of localization are highlighted to bring neuroanatomy to life and make it relevant to students of cognitive neuroscience.

Lecturers and presentations, including:

The brain in 3D
Orienteering in the Head: skull, meninges and vasculature
Visual system
Limbic system and amnesia
Neurological Patient exam videos
Anatomy of White Matter
Tractography
Scan reviews and neuroimaging labs
Sensori-motor systems