Neuroscience 2008: Ah, the humanity!
31,000 participants so far and counting. The density of humans at this meeting is unimaginable. But the programme is better than it's ever been.
New technologies, particularly imaging, have opened up fields of research that literally couldn't have been imagined twenty years ago, not least aspects of consciousness and behaviour that we thought would always remain in the private, personal and mysterious sphere. Lectures on decision-making are not one-minute-management guides, but address the very process of decision-making at the level of individual neurons deep in the brain. Symposia on the mechanisms of drug addiction, which over the decades seemed an insolvable problem, are now being profoundly linked to basic brain function. Now that we understand more about how memory works, and how important memory is in addiction, it no longer seems impossible -- just improbable.
What has surprised me most so far is the number of new techniques, for imaging living brains and cells, that have developed over the last year. I'm not a fan of such big meetings, but I'll probably go next year anyway because the stage is so well set for big things to be discovered.
