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Ours is an age of complexity, uncertainty and rapid change. Our response to these conditions has also made ours an age of anxiety, the effects of which are to be found everywhere - deteriorating mental health, increasing crime, a global environment under strain, the persistence and deepening of unequal patterns of distribution in income, wealth and well-being. In this lecture Maureen O'Hara presented a fresh look at these challenges and suggested that, if we can come to understand them in a different light, they offer the hope of transformation.

Professor Ian Deary, Director of The Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at Edinburgh University, presents this lecture on healthy cognitive ageing and principally, the research carried out on the Lothian birth cohorts of 1921 and 1936. He talks about the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947, the Murray House Test No.12 and how Scotland is unique in having twice measured the IQ of the entire nation. Professor Deary's lecture looks at four different areas that might be helpful in learning how we best can optimally cognitively age. These areas are lifestyle factors, biomedical factors, brain imaging and genetics.

Featuring renowned speakers Professor Richard Wilkinson and Professor Corey Keyes, this seminar was held in Glasgow on Thursday 11th October 2007. As part of the Journal of Public Mental Health series of seminars, it explored key issues in public mental health and invited debate about the gap between what we know about population level influences on mental health and current policy responses to psycho-social problems. The series was supported by the National Programme for Improving Mental Health and Wellbeing, the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, the Scottish Development Centre for Mental Health and the Mental Health Foundation.