Ladybeat

http://education.guardian.co.uk/
Baroness Susan Greenfield, author and professor of pharmacology at Oxford University

"Some ideas out of the ether seem to have their moment and this is one of them: that the new advances in IT and working with screens are having a palpable impact on how young people learn and, thus, how they see the world. It may be that we will have greater speed of thought or interaction as a result of using this technology, due to the fact that much of how we interact with the world will be through a screen rather than, say, a book.

"In the future, we may have people who don't need to know how to read or write. We may have a situation where anything can be learned anywhere. It could become second nature to need to learn or memorise nothing, because information will always be available.

"With a book, you read the beginning, the middle and the end, then you do the same with another book and compare the two - that's roughly how you learn. But in accessing information on screen, the premium is put on the image. This will also affect how we see our lives, because this contradicts the human impulse to construct a narrative - which is what books embody.

"What I'm concerned about is how we can structure education for the mid-21st century around this: perhaps one of the reasons for truancy is that contemporary education is not relevant to how students see the world. What I don't want to do is demonise this trend. Instead, we should be thinking about how to harness the technology to deliver what we want."

Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE

Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford and director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain since 1998.

Greenfield's primary research is in Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease and she co-founded a Oxford University spin-off company specialising in novel approaches to neurodegeneration called Synaptica.

Greenfield was an undergraduate at St Hilda's College, Oxford and subsequently took a DPhil in the University Department of Pharmacology. She has held fellowships in the Department of Physiology, Oxford; the College de France, Paris and NYU Medical Center, New York. In 1985 she was appointed University Lecturer in Synaptic Pharmacology and Fellow and Tutor in Medicine, Lincoln College. Subsequently she has also held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute of Neuroscience, La Jolla, USA, and was the 1996 Visiting Distinguished Scholar, Queens University, Belfast. The title of Professor of Pharmacology was conferred in 1996. In 1997 she was awarded an Honorary DSc by Oxford Brookes University, and has received Honorary DSc degrees, in 1998, from the University of St Andrew's and Exeter University.

Greenfield wrote Journey to the Centres of the Mind: Toward a Science of Consciousness (1995) and Private Life of the Brain (2000). She also wrote The Human Brain: A Guided Tour (1997). She wrote and presented Brain Story, broadcast by the BBC in 2000.

In 1998 she was awarded the Michael Faraday medal by the Royal Society and in 1999 was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians.

She is also involved in science policy and has given a consultative seminar to the Prime Minister on the future of science in the UK. She was awarded the CBE in the Millennium New Year’s Honour’s List and Life Peerage (non-political) in 2001.

She was an advisor to the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) when they were developing a code of practice for science and health reporting.

Greenfield is very outspoken on the issue of "women in science" [1] (http://education.guardian.co.uk/gendergap/story/0,7348,849552,00.html) and is a staunch opponent of the legalisation of cannabis [2] (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/drugs/story/0,11908,776610,00.html)

Research interests
Measurement of dopamine release ‘on-line’ from brain slices using fast scan cyclic voltammetry.
Real time monitoring of release of a protein from the brain in vivo
Electrophysiological recording from brain slices in vitro and substantia nigra in vivo in both physiological and pathological conditions
Study of mechanisms underlying regeneration and development of the pathway lost in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's disease, using organotypic co-cultures
Organotypic tissue culture

Positions held
Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain
Fullerian Professor of Physiology
Senior Research Fellow, Lincoln College
Honorary Fellow, St. Hilda's College
Gresham Chair of Physic (from 1996-1999)