“Chaos Around the Head”: A display of body maps from women with subjective cognitive decline and a performance on shifting caregiving relationships
Wilfred and Joyce Posluns' Chair in Women's Brain Health and Aging Knowledge Mobilization Story of the Year (2023)

• At the Women, Sex, Gender, and Dementia (WSGD) International Consensus Meeting, hosted by the Women, Sex, Gender, and Dementia Cross-cutting Program of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA) in March 2024, there were two arts-based knowledge mobilization sessions, researched and organized by Gillian Einstein, the Wilfred and Joyce Posluns’ Chair in Women's Brain Health and Aging and her colleagues, showing in visual and acrobatic form, the experience of memory loss as well as the experience of caregivers.  
• The main outcome was to emotionally move and shift conference participants’ thinking about memory and dementia from objective research to what the experience is like for those with memory decline to then, affect scientist’s research.
• It is too soon to know how these activities might change the conference invitees’ research, but the potential impact might be that they add their participants’ experiences to the design and interpretation of new studies or, to include their participants in the design and interpretation of their research.
• One trainee conference participant said that the best part of the conference was, “the art instillation and performance.” Another participant said that the best part of the conference was, “Engagement of People with Lived Experience of Dementia (EPLED) being welcomed to address participants (unfiltered) was bold and telling of your awareness of the need to give voice to the voiceless. The exhibit was amazing as was the performance.”
• Next steps with the Body Maps exhibit are to exhibit at the hospitals where the body maps creators are treated to (i) inform physicians of the brain ramifications of their patient’s ovarian surgery and (ii) provide the patient perspective and highlight their resilience.

About the Team

• Professor Gillian Einstein is the Wilfred and Joyce Posluns Chair in Women's Brain Health and Aging and the Women, Sex, Gender, and Dementia lead, at the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA). She studies memory in young women with early life removal of both ovaries to map the earliest changes toward Alzheimer disease.
• Professor Andrea Charise is a poet, arts educator, and scholar of the aesthetics of senescence, appointed in English and in Health Studies at the University of Toronto.
• Jana Galley is a graduate student in Gillian Einstein’s lab who undertook the project of body mapping memory of women with bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy for her Foundational Project in her PhD program at the University of Toronto.
• Professor Denise Gastaldo is an Associate Professor in the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto.
• Hemangi Schrof is an arts facilitator.

About the Chair

A partnered initiative between the Posluns Family Foundation, Women's Brain Health Initiative, the Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation, the Ontario Brain Institute, and the CIHR Institutes of Aging and Gender and Health. Posluns' Chair supports an academic Chair in Women's Brain Health and Aging. The Chair was renewed for a second phase in 2022 and is focused on supporting an outstanding research program in women's brain health and aging through: the study of cognitive aging and disorders; building capacity for research on brain health and aging that accounts for sex and gender; and the translation of research into gender and sex responsive policies and interventions that improve brain health and promote wellness in aging. The Chair was awarded to Dr. Gillian Einstein, Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Gender and Health, Psychology Department, University of Toronto.