List of awareness days

A national or international awareness day is a date usually set by a major organisation or government to commemorate a public health or ethical cause of importance on a national or international level.

Days

January

February

Brain Awareness Week

Brain Awareness Week - global campaign, promoting public interest in neuroscience research held by Society for Neuroscience and Dana Alliance for Brain Brain Initiatives along with International Brain Bee contest and other efforts. It is annual event started in 1995 and held in third week of March. In 2014 there are 55 countries involved and more than 860 events were held.

Events consist of lectures on brain connected topics, brain exhibitions, excursions to neuroscience laboratories and museums, brain lessons for school students.

There is support from leading universities neuroscience schools, neuroscience publishers, national neuroscience societies.

References

Sources

Brain

The brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. Only a few invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, adult sea squirts and starfish do not have a brain; diffuse or localised nerve nets are present instead. The brain is located in the head, usually close to the primary sensory organs for such senses as vision, hearing, balance, taste, and smell. The brain is the most complex organ in a vertebrate's body. In a typical human, the cerebral cortex (the largest part) is estimated to contain 15–33 billion neurons, each connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons. These neurons communicate with one another by means of long protoplasmic fibers called axons, which carry trains of signal pulses called action potentials to distant parts of the brain or body targeting specific recipient cells.

Physiologically, the function of the brain is to exert centralized control over the other organs of the body. The brain acts on the rest of the body both by generating patterns of muscle activity and by driving the secretion of chemicals called hormones. This centralized control allows rapid and coordinated responses to changes in the environment. Some basic types of responsiveness such as reflexes can be mediated by the spinal cord or peripheral ganglia, but sophisticated purposeful control of behavior based on complex sensory input requires the information integrating capabilities of a centralized brain.

Awareness

Awareness is the ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects, thoughts, emotions, or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of something. In biological psychology, awareness is defined as a human's or an animal's perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or event.

Concept

Awareness is a relative concept. An animal may be partially aware, may be subconsciously aware, or may be acutely unaware of an event. Awareness may be focused on an internal state, such as a visceral feeling, or on external events by way of sensory perception. Awareness provides the raw material from which animals develop qualia, or subjective ideas about their experience. Insects have awareness that you are trying to swat them or chase after them. But insects do not have consciousness in the usual sense, because they lack the brain capacity for thought and understanding.

Week

A week is a time unit equal to seven days. It is the standard time period used for cycles of work days and rest days in most parts of the world, mostly alongside (but not strictly part of) the Gregorian calendar.

The days of the week were named in different languages after classical planets, various deities (example: Thursday – Thor's day, a variation after Jupiter's day from Roman times) and heavenly bodies (example: Sunday – Sun's day) and other sources. In English, the names are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

ISO 8601 includes the ISO week date system, a numbering system for weeks within a given year – each week begins on a Monday and is associated with the year that contains that week's Thursday (so that if a year starts in a long weekend Friday–Sunday, week number one of the year will start after that).

The term "week" is sometimes expanded to refer to other time units comprising a few days, such as the nundinal cycle of the ancient Roman calendar.