Associate Professor Mike Colombo
12/06/08 12:38
Mike Colombo is a psychologist with a reputation as an outstanding teacher. He did his reputation no harm at all last night when he delivered an absolutely riveting lecture on the history of lobotomies.
The audience was at once fascinated and somewhat repulsed at the brutal nature of the physical interventions designed to cure psychological illnesses. But Mike was careful to lace his talk with humour and not let the gory details distract from the main messages of the talk.
In part it was a story about personalities and science. In part it was warning about using inadequate follow-up periods for evaluating effectiveness. And, in part, it was a reminder about just how far medicine - and psychology in particular - has advanced in the last half century, especially when it comes to our understanding of the brain.
The lecture was given as a joint contribution from the University of Otago’s Centre for Science Communication and the Department of Psychology to the International Science Fair running in Dunedin. There was a large contingent of bright secondary school science students from Australia and New Zealand present in the audience. It was clear from the questions they peppered Mike with afterwards, that they, like the rest of the audience, found the lecture fascinating and wanted to hear more from this excellent communicator.
