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How do you persuade people to agree to donate their brain after death?
People can understandably be a bit squeamish about the idea of handing over their brain. But these are people we鈥檝e been working with face-to-face, doing cognitive testing, for over a decade so we know them fairly well. We send them a letter so they have the opportunity to think about it with their family without any pressure.

There are several other brain banks, why is yours different?
It is the only one where the people had their intelligence tested 70 years ago. It started with the discovery of a box of old IQ test scores in a basement of the University of Edinburgh. At that time, the UK government believed the population was becoming less clever because better-off couples were having fewer children than the 鈥渓ower classes鈥� 鈥� just crazy! They 11-year-olds in 1932 and 1947 to see how intelligence shifted. A comparison of the results 鈥� published in The Annals of Eugenics 鈥� showed that , so the project was shelved.

Why did your team resurrect this research?
Retesting those people first tested in 1947 now they are approaching their 80s is an incredible resource for learning how we can stay mentally sharp into old age. Many things have been claimed to help, like drinking red wine or learning new languages. But the picture might be getting muddied because those things also correlate with baseline intelligence in childhood: it鈥檚 not that drinking red wine keeps you sharp, it鈥檚 that if you are clever to start with you are more likely to be middle class and therefore drink red wine. But if you know childhood IQ, you can take this into account. We have shown that some of .

What is gained by dissecting brains as well?
It may shed light on the idea of cognitive reserve. This suggests that if you spend your life reading books, being socially active and healthy, it helps your brain to form more connections, or synapses. When you get older and start to lose some synapses, these extra ones can retain your cognitive performance into old age.

Are you able to count synapses in brain samples?
Yes. We are using a technique that cuts pieces of brain tissue into 70-nanometre-thin slices that we look at using fluorescent microscopy. Then our computer reconstructs the sections into 3D shapes, so we can count the synapses. We will look at 38 different areas of the brain.

How far along is the project?
So far 173 people have agreed to donate their brains and the first two brains have just come in. Obviously it is too soon to draw conclusions, but as the study progresses we are going to gather valuable information. We are also about to start sequencing the genomes of participants and take blood samples so we can create personalised stem cells for each one and grow them into neurons, for testing in the lab. It鈥檚 a very exciting time.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭he brain collector鈥�