from the other senses, especially touch, in people who have been blind since shortly after birth. After stroke or other forms of brain injury, reorganisation of this sort can help the process of recovery, as other parts of the brain take over the function of the damaged part. Blakemore's later work emphasized the variety of molecular mechanisms that contribute to plasticity and identified some of the genes involved in enabling nerve cells to modify their connections in response to the flow of nerve impulses through them. He summarised research on brain plasticity in his 2005 Harveian Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians and explored the role of plasticity in human cultural evolution in his 2010 Ferrier Lecture at the Royal Society. He served on the Editorial Board of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. Public engagement and public service In parallel with his academic career, Blakemore championed the communication of science and engagement with the public on controversial and challenging aspects. In 1976, at the age of 32, he was the youngest person to give the BBC Reith Lectures for which he presented a series of six talks entitled Mechanics of the Mind. He subsequently presented or contributed to hundreds of radio and television broadcasts. He gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1982–3, and wrote and presented many other programmes about science, including a 13-part series, The Mind Machine on BBC television, a radio series about artificial intelligence, Machines with Minds, and a documentary for Channel 4 television, God and the Scientists. He wrote for British and overseas newspapers, especially The Guardian, The Observer, the Daily Telegraph and The Times. He also wrote or edited several popular science books, including Mechanics of the Mind, The Mind Machine. Gender and Society, Mindwaves, Images and Understanding and The Oxford Companion to the Body. Since 2004 he was Honorary President of the Association of British Science Writers. In 1989, when Blakemore was awarded the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize for his work in public communication, the citation described him as "one of Britain's most influential communicators of science". He won many other awards for his work in public communication and education, including the Phi Beta Kappa Award for contribution to the literature of science, the John P McGovern Science and Society Medal from Sigma Xi, the Edinburgh Medal from the City of Edinburgh and the Science Educator Award from the Society for