with DR TAMAR MAKIN, DR ALDO FAISAl & DR ISABEL VAN DE KEERE on body representation, brain organisation and virtual reality, chaired by CATHERINE ALLEN.

For the festival, I wanted to put on an event that walked the audience through the ways that VR could be used in physical rehabilitation; right from the neuroscience that informs the way we understand the relationship between the brain and body parts, to the cutting-edge therapies that integrate Virtual Reality and prosthetics.

Dr Tamar Makin is a neuroscientist at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, researching how adaptive behaviour, such as prosthetic limb usage, drives brain plasticity. Her research suggests that brain plasticity in amputees is not inherently harmful, and could be exploited for improving rehabilitation. Dr Aldo Faisal is Associate Professor for Neurotechnology at Imperial College London and Director of the Behaviour Analytics Lab at the Data Science Institute. Dr Faisal's work combines cross-disciplinary computational and experimental approaches to investigate how the brain and its neural circuits are designed to learn and control goal-directed movements. Dr Isabel Van De Keere is the CEO and Founder of Immersive Rehab, a Virtual Reality healthtech startup that focuses on the creation and development of interactive environments & games in Virtual Reality that improve the effectiveness of physical & neuro-rehabilitation. Following a long physical rehab period Isabel went through herself due to a work accident, she decided to start Immersive Rehab in September 2016. Our chair, Catherine Allen, is a virtual reality producer and curator who headed up the creation of two of the BBC's first non-fiction VR experiences.