Spreading the word...

New year comes and goes - we draft an article for the British Neuroscience Assocation on engaging scientists with the public. Its fitting to be writing for the BNA as two years ago at their conference, Erinma showed a film showing that a lot of commonly used words in science conjure up completely different images in the public - Robert Winston also gave a talk. The event was packed out with about 300 scientists in attendance. Although people seemed to enjoy the film and the talk - the general impression seemed to be 'its great you are doing that communication business - we just don't have the time'. In fact this is where the idea was spawned - how can we engage scientists in communicating science when they have so little time?