More than 80,000 people have helped BCBL unravel the mysteries of the brain
The mayor of Donostia, Eneko Goia, visited BCBL to get to know the activity and laboratories of the neuroscientific research centre at first hand.
Since its creation 15 years ago, BCBL has enjoyed the collaboration of the citizens of the surrounding area: a total of 81,885 people have participated in its studies.
Six recently launched projects with European funding will once again require the voluntary participation of people of all ages, from babies to the elderly.
Since 2010, more than 80,000 residents of all ages from Donostia and its immediate surroundings have passed through the laboratories of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) research centre to help unravel the mysteries of the human brain.
Today, as a token of gratitude to all these people, a total of 81,885, who have collaborated in their studies, the scientific director, Manuel Carreiras, and the manager, Ana Fernández, received a visit from Eneko Goia, Mayor of Donostia, accompanied by the Councillor for Culture and Basque, Jon Insausti.
Both were able to get a close-up view of the activity carried out at BCBL with two main objectives: to improve language learning strategies from an early age and to find new ways of diagnosis, intervention or rehabilitation for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and language disorders such as dyslexia.
‘Citizen collaboration has been essential from the very beginning for our studies. Every day, from babies to elderly people pass through our laboratories, helping us to obtain the data we need to be able to carry out our scientific work and then return it to society with new knowledge’, emphasised Manuel Carreiras, Ikerbasque professor and leader of the “Neurobiology of language” research group at BCBL.
This collaboration with the San Sebastian society, together with the research projects carried out at BCBL, have contributed to making the centre one of the benchmarks for converting Donostia into a scientific hub for local and international talent.
The centre has more than 90 researchers from many countries and serves as a global pool for the future of neuroscience applied to the study of language processes.
More involvement
In the coming years, BCBL will continue to need the contribution of the citizens of San Sebastian to increase knowledge about the brain mechanisms involved in key processes in a person’s development, such as the acquisition of reading, speech production or bilingualism. An example of this are six projects funded by the European Union.
On the one hand, the CORTICAL RHYTHMS project, led by Manuel Carreiras, which obtained the Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). His team will seek to identify biomarkers to develop new and more effective intervention programmes to mitigate disorders such as dyslexia and improve language learning.
For her part, Ikerbasque researcher Marie Lallier will lead, thanks to an ERC Consolidator Grant, an ambitious project involving 500 Basque and Spanish bilingual children to find out whether early exposure to more than one language can counteract the genetic risks of reading disorders.
In addition, four projects selected in the latest call for Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral grants from the European Commission will be carried out at BCBL and will require the help of volunteers of different ages.
‘One of the projects will analyse, for example, how novice readers develop compensatory strategies in the acquisition of reading in different languages; and another will examine how musical training can improve perception and prosodic production in a second language, also assessing the influence of bilingualism and musical aptitude in this process,’ explained Carreiras.
