PINT OF SCIENCE FESTIVAL
19-21 MAY 2025
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Last chance to catch the Pint of Science festival at Leuven central for another year! Tonight our scientists are playing mind games, looking at how we perceive senses, experience sexual desire, and process memories.
Sexual desire: demystifying the enigmatic urge
Sofia Prekatsounaki
Postdoctoral Researcher
KU Leuven
Is it an instinct? No! Is it a drive? No! It is the product of our interaction with a competent sexual stimulus. For long, we have believed that sexual desire is an enigmatic urge, a mysterious force that pushes us towards sexual behaviour, without us having much control over it. Luckily, we know now that sexual desire is subject to tangible biological, psychological, and social influences. When it comes to sexual desire specifically for our partner, it is the product of how we interact with each other in our everyday lives. Science has thus demystified the enigmatic urge. Or.. not quite?
You shall (not) pass: how our brains determine what we sense in the body
Valentina Jelinčić
PhD Researcher
KU Leuven
It is a hectic world out there… With so many sights, sounds, and sensations, how do our brains make sense of it all? By running all the signals from our senses through a filter, and only letting the important information come to our awareness. When this system fails, people can become sensitive to sensory stimulation or even develop hallucinations. We are investigating how sensations within our bodies (for example, small changes in breathing) are filtered by the brain, and if this relates to how we experience and deal with symptoms of illness, such as pain and shortness of breath.
“But nothing happened!” – denials and eyewitness memory in the legal arena
Charlotte Bücken
PhD Researcher
KU Leuven
Our memory does not work like a video camera. We can remember details or entire events that we never actually experienced. This phenomenon is called 'false memories'. We can also forget that something happened to us. Both of these memory mistakes can be problematic in court, where the decision of whether someone is guilty or not can rely entirely on memory evidence. In this talk, I discuss research where I examined how people come forward about traumatic events, such as abuse, and how denials might affect forgetting and the formation of such false memories.
