Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 05 June
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
The mind works in obscure, often inconvenient, ways. Do you find you can recall every line of Wayne’s World dialogue, but you’ve forgotten your own blood type, your seven times tables, your grandmother’s maiden name, the year of the Battle of Hastings?
What do our minds retain, what do they discard, and why? Diving deep into the subconscious for this discussion, we’ll explore the latest in psychology and neuroscience to gain some novel perspectives around forgetting. Is memory loss a natural part of ageing? When is forgetting a brain malfunction, and when it is a healthy, cleansing act of the subconscious? Can forgetting be as valuable as remembering? Can forgetting spur creativity?
Join us for a fresh and memorable conversation on the psychological, scientific and even psychoanalytical processes of forgetting.
Featuring
Leah Kaminsky
Leah Kaminsky, physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel is The Waiting Room won the Voss Literary Prize for the best novel of 2016. We’re all Going to Die has been described as ‘a joyful book about death’. She edited Writer MD and co-authored Cracking the Code. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Ashley Bush
Professor Ashley Bush is a practising psychiatrist and an NHMRC Australia Fellow, and co-director of Biomarker Discovery for the Australian Imaging Biomarker and Lifestyle Flagship Study of Ageing. He holds an academic appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer's research. He is also Director of the Oxidation Biology Unit at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne.
He discovered the importance of metals in degenerative disease, particularly in Alzheimer's and he is actively working to develop new and improved disease-modifying drugs as well as drug tests to help diagnose and monitor disease progression.
He is the recipient of the Victoria Prize for Science and Innovation for his body of work on translational neuroscience.
Jee Hyun Kim
Dr Jee Hyun Kim is a behavioral neuroscientist, whose work focuses on emotional learning and memory during childhood and adolescence. She is a Senior Research Fellow and head of the Developmental Psychobiology Laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne.
Kim's research shows that the acquisition and retrieval of fear memories is different across childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Kim was also the first to demonstrate that fear memories can be permanently erased early in life.
Kim’s research uses preclinical paradigms to model human behaviors, in order to understand the neurobiological basis of learning. Specifically, her work investigates the role of memory and forgetting in the development and treatment of two major mental disorders across childhood and adolescence: anxiety disorder and substance abuse disorder. Kim has published over 40 original papers to date, and her work has been cited over 800 times.
Kim is an active science communicator, and has given public lectures at TEDx Melbourne, Australian Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Victorian Science Week and City of Melbourne. She has written several articles for the Conversation, and has interviewed for ABC Radio, Radio New Zealand, SBS TV, and Channel 10 (The Project).
Kim is also a vocal advocate for women in science, and was acknowledged for her work as a proponent in the manuscript of Kate White’s book, Building effective career paths for women in science research: a case study of an Australian science research institute.
Leonardo Salvador Rodríguez
Leonardo Salvador Rodríguez is a psychoanalyst.
He is a founding member of the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis and of the International School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field, and is currently the coordinator of the Institute for Training of the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis, where he teaches.
He has been in charge of the Master of Psychoanalysis programme at Victoria University, and was a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, Monash University. He was trained in psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Paris and Melbourne. He is the author of Psychoanalysis with Children (Free Association Books, 1999) and numerous book chapters and articles in different languages on psychoanalytic theory and practice.