SfN 2009: The attention of owls
Sudden movements and sounds can trigger a battle between neurons in the brain, and the winners get to decide where an animal will look, according to new research. Read the full story on Nature News.
Nature Newsblog
Nature Newsblog
October 24, 2009
October 20, 2009
SfN 2009: Total recall achieved
The stimulation of a tiny number of neurons can evoke entire memories, new research in mice suggests. Read the full story on Nature News here.
SfN 2009: Optogenetics - the second wave
There are heaps of posters and presentations this year about optogenetics — the technique developed just a few years ago at Stanford by Karl Deisseroth and Ed Boyden, in which neurons can be engineered to respond to light. There's even a section of the press book on optogenetics. If this had been a year ago, I might have rolled my eyes and thought, "optogenetics is so 2005", but it looks like the technology is riding on its second wave: it's out there, people trust it, and now labs are using it in quite creative ways and actually discovering new things about the brain. A few people at the conference are already murmuring about a Nobel for optogenetics.
The hottest thing I saw so far was a poster by Matteo Rizzi and Kate Powell from Michael Häusser's lab at University College London. The group put the light-sensitive protein channelrhodopsin (ChR2, the most commonly used protein for optogenetics that's sensitive to blue light) under the control of the promoter for c-fos, a gene that is expressed by recently activated neurons. This way, they could specifically hit neurons that had been involved in a behavior or task. It's a great new tool that they used to generate a very exciting result, which you can read about on Nature News.
Continue reading "SfN 2009: Optogenetics - the second wave" »
October 19, 2009
SfN 2009: NIH and neuroscience
In a first for the SfN conference, the director of the NIH -- who ultimately holds the purse strings for most of the people here -- made an appearance and addressed the crowd. Francis Collins began his talk with a facetious reference to some of the criticism he's fielded since his appointment just months ago.
"Those of you who have been reading the blogs might expect me to begin with a benediction, I assure you I have no intention of doing that," he said. "I won't ask you to pray for anything, except perhaps the FY2011 budget.”
Collins highlighted the increases to NIH funding in the stimulus bill, the hope for the new Challenge Grants and progress with establishing NIH guidelines for human embryonic stem cell research. He also stressed the importance of the NIH blueprint for neuroscience research, which includes the human connectome project.
He then continued preaching to the choir, listing the themes NIH thinks are important for neuroscience, such as translating basic discoveries to treatments, incorporating genomics, being interdisciplinary, etc. I doubt any of the neuroscientists here got any new ideas from his presentation, but Collins' presence was symbolically important. Knowing that the government thinks this work is a priority is a welcome change for these folks.
October 17, 2009
SfN 2009: Why fMRI is still useful
Functional MRI has been getting a bad rap lately, with recent papers and posters critical of fMRI analyses receiving a frenzy of media attention. These have generated a harsh reaction from the public; many journalist friends of mine have declared they'll never write about an fMRI study ever again.
Sure, some people are seduced by the pretty pictures and like to think they let scientists “see our thoughts”, and this fantasy should be nipped in the bud. But while fMRI has its limitations, it's a valuable technique that, when performed correctly, can give neuroscientists a unique insight into the brain.
SfN gave me a nice opportunity to get an fMRI veteran's perspective on the state of fMRI in science and the public. John Gabrieli at MIT has been working in the field since the early years (fMRI only came about in the early 90's), and has written and spoken extensively on the power and limitations of the technique. Here he participated in the “Meet the Experts” series, where he gave a presentation about the technique to a small group of mostly post-docs and students over breakfast.
He noted that the flashy colorful pictures of brain activation are statistical maps — not actual changes in blood flow. For example, if you have a very powerful visual stimulus, like a flashing light, the signal in the visual cortex would change by about 3%. Same for the BOLD signal in the motor cortex when you wave your arms around wildly. But for most interesting activities — thoughts, feelings, desires, memories — a signal change of half of 1% would be “a really good day”, he says. He points out that if we had been doing imaging before the famous patient H.M., we would have no idea the hippocampus was involved in memory formation; “we would have spent 20 years thinking the hippocampus was not involved in memory, because in dozens of memory tasks we couldn't get hippocampus.”
Gabrieli says this super-weak signal means we're actually missing a lot of stuff, and are at a far greater risk for false negatives than we are for false positives. People only get into trouble with false positives when they try to overcompensate for this low signal, and Gabrieli detailed ways to avoid this trap.
Gabrieli also spoke about some of the newer uses for fMRI, beyond just trying to see “where” things happen in the brain. For example, if scientists could find brain activation patterns in young people that were associated with the later development of diseases like schizophrenia or depression, they could use fMRI as a far more accurate predictor of psychiatric disease than genetic testing, which is extremely limited.
Another hot area of fMRI research is “real time” fMRI, in which a subject's fMRI signal feeds back to what they see. For example, if a certain area of the brain is active when the subjects are ready to remember a picture, the fMRI can wait until this brain region is active before presenting the picture. A few people have already started thinking about clinical applications of “real time” fMRI, such as enhancing learning, behavioral therapy and giving people “control” over their auditory cortex to stop tinnitus.
SfN 2009: Chicago got brains
The massive annual conference of the Society for Neuroscience hit the ground running today in sunny and crisp Chicago. It's only day one and the conference center is already clogged with neuroscientists. Attendance is supposedly around 30,000 this year — a staggering number, but down from the conference's peak a few years ago in Washington, D.C. when attendance almost hit 35,000 (and when travel budgets were a bit more generous).
30K-plus is still a decent number, but apparently not big enough to take over the McCormick Place convention center — just next door from the conference, McCormick was hosting open auditions for season 5 of America's Got Talent, and a dense and enormous stream of aspiring stars and their parents snaked around the conference center for most of the day.
There are plenty of other reporters here blogging and tweeting away, including Greg Miller at Science, DrugMonkey, the folks Tweeting with #sfn09 and eight "official" SfN bloggers. The latter is SfN's admirable effort to actively integrate live blogging into their conference. Of course, plenty of people manage to blog and Tweet without the "official" designation, and it's unclear whether this will actually impact coverage — but at least SfN is embracing social media, as opposed to clamping down (which has its pros and cons).
October 16, 2009
SfN 2009: Let the conference begin
Nature reporter Lizzie Buchen will be covering this year's Society for Neuroscience conference from Chicago. Look for updates from her on all things brainy from 17-21 October.
November 19, 2008
Neuroscience 2008: Stem cell lethargy
Some fantastic work was presented at the press conference on stem cells, but it all fell rather flat – the only conference I was at that finished early for lack of questions.
We heard about really cool stuff from Korea. Sujeong Jang partially repaired hearing in guinea pigs whose inner ears had been injured by destroying those little hair-like cells which turn sound waves into electrical signals. She transformed bone-marrow-derived stem cells into neuron-like cells and transplanted them into the inner ear. The number of new hair cells expanded, along with restoration of hearing. The MP3 generation will be glad this work is going on now – if the trajectory continues, ways of repairing currently irreversible inner ear damage will be available to them by the time they are old enough to need it.
Michael Zuber from SUNY, Syracuse reported his work showing he could convert pluripotent cells from frog cells into all seven classes of retinal cells normally found in the eye – and that these cells could be made to form complete, functioning eyes in tadpoles.
And Australian scientists reported on some intriguing new latent stem cells in the hippocampus of mice. Tara Walker suggests that these could potentially be activated in situ in neurodegenerative diseases.
Why the journalistic lethargy? One problem is that the press conference presenters declined to comment on the broader questions posed by the journalists– how might the politics of embryonic stem cell research in the US change, why is so much low-quality adult stem cell research being brought already into the clinic? Participants conveyed an air of defensiveness that was obviously strategic but nonetheless annoying.
Secondly, perhaps in the [misguided] interests of avoiding hype, they failed to present a useful context. It is just getting really hard for journalists to sort out how they should react to new findings in adult stem cell research. There is so much that is good, so much that is trivial, and not a clear enough signal from those in the field of where the difference lies.
Neuroscience 2008: Missing in action
Last year there was wild buzz about some new techniques predicted to transform biology. The Brainbow, of course, but even more the light-activated channel rhodopsins which allow you to activate or deactivate key proteins with the flash of light of particular wavelength - you could watch the consequences of opening membrane channels, for example, in a live animal. Yet close to nothing is being presented on this at this meeting.
Does this mean no-one is taking up the offer to transform biology? That is certainly not the case. I suspect that the problem has more to do with the fierce competition in the field. Everyone is playing their cards very close to their chest. The Neuroscience meeting is sadly not always the place for open discussion and presentation of red-hot new results.
November 18, 2008
Neuroscience 2008: Remembering memory
The History of Neuroscience lecture this afternoon was one I had been really looking forward to. McGill University’s Brenda Milner was to speak on the field of memory, which - when she began to study it in the 1950s - was rather unfashionable and certainly understudied.
Milner was recruited to the Montreal Neurological Institute to work alongside surgeon Wilder Penfield, who was performing operations to treat intractable epilepsy. The recognised procedure at the time involved taking out tissue from the brain’s temporal lobe. Of course, looking inside the brain to discern what to take and what to leave was barely possible when these operations were being carried out, and so in a couple of cases, surgeons removed far more than they bargained for. Milner tested memory in several patients who had had such surgery, and the expertise of her and her colleagues in this area led Dr Henry Scoville to get in touch when in 1953, an operation he had performed for epilepsy at a hospital in Hertford, Connecticut had left his patient with severe amnesia.
That patient was HM, whose anterograde amnesia (he cannot form new memories) has since been widely studied by Milner and subsequently her colleagues and others. Milner told his story with wit and warmth, explaining what it was like to work with him for 30 years (he was very friendly and amenable to being studied, and would try hard to perform well on the tests he was given), illustrating the challenges with anecdotes. There were many times she would give him a test to do, step out of the room for half an hour, and then go back in and have to reintroduce herself as if they had never met.
One particularly lasting contribution was her finding that although HM couldn’t tell her who the president was, or remember a number she had given him 5 minutes earlier, he could in fact form one type of new memory, and that was for motor skills. Milner described to us a set of tests on mirror drawing, where the subject must draw a figure looking not at their hand but in a mirror – something that normal subjects improve upon over time. HM also showed this improvement, but he wouldn’t remember having done the test before, and as a consequence he thought the test rather easy.
The pace with which Milner delivered her talk was pretty swift, and certainly belied her 90 years (she was born in 1918 in Manchester, UK). But to listen to such an engaging speaker talk about such a pioneering life in science - I only wished it could have gone on longer.
Neuroscience 2008: New 'epigenetic' memory drug
Michael Ahlijanian, a vice-president of the small biotech company EnVivo, told the meeting that the company’s new compound EVP-0334 is to enter clinical trials for treating memory disorders ‘very soon’. That it has made it so far is surprising and scientifically interesting, particularly since it acts by interfering with epigenetic phenomena in the brain.
This small molecule blocks a class of enzymes called histone deacetylases. These enzymes strip acetyl groups from histone proteins surrounding tightly coiled strands of DNA. Acetyl groups mark the DNA for unwinding so that genes can be exposed for transcription. By stopping the enzymes from working, EVP-0334 promotes a looser DNA structure and thus more gene expression.
According to Ahlijanian the compound enhances long-term and short-term memory in mice – not in all memory tasks though. It’s very robust in object recognition tests, good but less robust in spatial recognition tests and it does not affect other aspects of memory like contextual fear conditioning. He also says that it showed no toxicity in the mice at high doses for 28 days.
That’s the interesting thing. Why not? Histone deacetylase inhibitors don’t feel intuitively very selective. After all, they keep open those stretches of DNA tagged with acetyl groups, exposing lots of genes. Ahlijanian said that ‘only’ 5% or fewer genes were affected by EVP-0334 – but that’s a hell of a lot. Yet the response in the mice seems to be very specific – and no-one gets close to clinical trials without good toxicology data. Ahlijanian doesn’t have the answer – he doesn’t even know for sure yet which are the relevant genes activated by the drug -- but he speculates that it may be down to regional distributions of relevant gene promoters.
Histone deacetylase inhibitors are already used in cancer therapies but those in the clinic do not get into the brain. EVP-0334 passes the blood-brain barrier. If it really does get into clinical trials it’ll be a welcome new addition to the list of hopefuls for Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders of memory, and one with a novel mechanism. That’s of course a long way off. In the meantime it will be extremely interesting to follow how the science of its mechanism unfolds.
November 17, 2008
Neuroscience 2008: Brain, meet machine; machine, meet brain
I’m a sucker for the rather trendy area of brain-machine interfaces, which is why I poked my nose into the symposium on Advanced Neurotechnologies for Chronic Neural Interfaces this afternoon. This is the kind of work that aims to take brain activity and use it to control prosthetics, or even to control an individual’s own limb. The first speaker was Eberhard Fetz of the University of Washington in Seattle, whose team recently published this paper (here’s the Nature News story) on controlling muscles directly with electrical activity from neurons routed through a computer.
I was interested in what he sees in the future of this technology, and the next steps he and his team are now taking to advance their recent work. While their recent Nature paper connected brain activity directly to muscles, Fetz also talked about the possibility of connecting certain parts of the brain to other parts, to induce plasticity and remapping. This could be of use in order to remodel bits of the brain to perform a function that has been lost through damage or disease, for example.
He also mentioned that his colleague Ted Berger, who is at the University of Southern California, is working on ‘cognitive prosthetics’ – computer programs that simulate the activity in a particular brain area that may have been damaged, and can therefore sub in for it in a network. For example, damage to the CA3 region in the hippocampus is devastating to memory; Berger is working on a CA3 model in order to reconnect the dentate gyrus, upstream, with with another part of the hippocampus, CA1.
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.
Neuroscience 2008: History lessons
I always enjoy, as a bit of a departure from the rest of the conference, checking out the History of Neuroscience posters, typically situated in row ZZ through ZZZ of the enormous hall, and not so well-attended as the rest of the selection. Which is a shame, as many provide a really nice way to step back from calcium channel agonists or dopamine activity in area LMAN of the zebra finch brain, and take a wider-angle look at the field. Sunday's highlights: Aristotle; and a neuroscience of neuroscience.
A recent book by science writer Jonah Lehrer proclaimed in its title that Proust was a Neuroscientist. In it, Lehrer makes the point that Proust anticipated, in the early twentieth century, a lot of what neuroscientists have only recently found out about the strength of memories relating to taste and smell, and how memory depends on the time and situation of the individual.
Well, a poster today claimed that Aristotle too was a neuroscientist before his time. Aristotle talked about the psyche as a central faculty that connected up many other mental properties. A group from Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada, argue 'that psyche can be defined as neural activity', and 'our current views on consciousness, perception, sensation, and thought as neural processes may have been anticipated by Aristotle' – before anyone even had any idea what a neuron was.
Another history section favourite of mine was a poster entitled 'Circling the square: towards a neuroscience of neuroscience'. The presenter, Rutgers University's Kai Schreiber, who according to his website studies the neuroscience of vision, was not on hand to explain the (surely) tongue-in-cheek experiments, which included putting a subject (yes, just n=1) in a scanner and showing them neuroscientific articles. This apparently activiated 'their left brain'. Nice and specific. The poster's conclusion section claimed, among other things, that this neuro-neuroscience approach could lead to the creation of neural networks that could build neural networks, and that we surely aren't too far from a neuro-neuro-neuroscience, which I guess is a neuroscience of the neuroscience of neuroscience. Kai, if you're reading this, please feel free to explain. My suspicion is that it was really an anthropological observation gauging people's reactions to the neuro-neuroscience theory...
Neuroscience 2008: Some NIH stats
The directors of each of the neuro-related National Institutes of Health convened for a press conference this morning. Those of us who were after hard news were a little disappointed, but I found the short talks a useful basis for the rest of the sessions, many of which I of course won't be able to get to given that the committee love to run at least six interesting things concurrently (like the Queen of Hearts, we are running to stay in the same place, but unlike her we cannot attend six impossible talks before breakfast).
Best for background was NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) director Tom Insel, who reminded us why many of the scientists at SfN do what they do: to help understand and treat neurological and mental illness. He gave us some sobering stats too: 90% of the 30,000 suicides in the US every year are due to mental illness; the average age at death of someone with a mental illness is 25 years less than a healthy contemporary, at 56 years of age; and while only 4% of the US population have a major mental illness, they smoke 44% of the cigarettes sold, hinting at the knock-on effects of diseases of the brain and mind on health in general.
So whilst a lot of the science here is fundamental in nature, it'll be useful to remember why it's being done - and where the dollars are coming from.
November 16, 2008
Neuroscience 2008: But how does the cat feel about dogs?
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
The parasite Toxoplasma gondii causes rodents to enter the lion’s den: They go against their instincts and sniff out the scent of cat urine. Now, new research has identified the specific regions in the brain involved in this game of cat-and-mouse.
Toxo is a parasite that can only reproduce in the gut of a cat, so it “basically co-opts certain brain circuits in the rats’ amygdala to change their fear into a sexual attraction,” says Patrick House, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
The team scanned the brains of both healthy and Toxo-infected rats to see which neurons fired when the rats smelled scents classified as neutral, feline, or potential mates. The healthy rats exposed to cat odour show an increase in stress hormones. But infected rats showed a reduced hormone response. In fact, neurons in the same amygdala regions fire in an infected rat as they do in a male rat smelling a potential female mate.
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November 15, 2008
Society for Neuroscience 2008
The annual behemoth of a conference that is the Society for Neuroscience meeting kicks off here in Washington today. They expect about 30,000 neuroscientists to attend - probably using about that many calories each running from poster session, to symposium, to lecture througout the event. Together with Alison Abbott and Ashley Yeager, I'll be blogging about what's going on.
By the way, it hasn't escaped SfN's notice that there's some other little meeting in town this weekend too:
'G20 Summit in Downtown Washington
As Neuroscience 2008 approaches, SfN is monitoring Washington heightened security in effect due to the G20 summit meeting at the National Building Museum. No disruption of meeting activities is anticipated, but some street closures are probable, as are minor disruptions on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit system (Metro).'
Sadly, it doesn't seem as if anyone has planned a satellite event on neuroeconomics and the neuroscience of the credit crunch to take advantage of the overlap.
November 07, 2007
SfN: Drug calms violent rats
Researchers have found a drug that can reduce aggressive behaviour in feral rats that have been trained to be violent. Check out the news story on Nature News.
Sfn: hope in stroke
Amid the dazzling high-tech displays of new-generation brain-machine interfaces (including brain implants with which monkeys can operate robotic arms) was a less glamorous but elegantly simple study which promises to improve quality of life for stroke victims, or victims of traumatic brain injury, whose ability to balance has been obliterated.
Monica Metea of the company Wicab in Wisconsin displayed her company’s new balancing device BrainPort which has been through a pilot study of 17 patients, allowing them to stand, walk, dance without falling over.
It works on the principle of brain plasticity. It’s a slim 2 cm square grid of 100 electrodes connected to a head position-detecting sensor which sits directly above them. The patients sticks the device in their mouths, and quickly learns from the pattern of the pinprick sensations delivered by the electrodes which way is up and which way is down. The brain also learns this in a physical sense. Somehow certain circuits get reconfigured such that even after the device is removed – after 20 minutes or so – the patient maintains his or her sense of balance, for hours, sometimes for days. No need to open up the skull and implant the device directly into delicate brain tissue like the more dramatic stories which will eventually help the paralysed. But applicable to probably millions of people who can’t stand up without falling over.
Another rather astonishing glimmer of hope for stroke victims was the report from neurosurgeon Eric Leuthard from the Washington University School of Medicine. One hemisphere of the brain controls arm and leg movement on the other side – but Leutard’s team has shown that the apparently embryonic signals in a ‘same side’ hemisphere are small but unique. They could theoretically be tapped to replace signals from the ‘opposite side’, if that opposite side has been disabled by the stroke. There’s more to come from this direction.
Leuthard did his work on six epilepsy patients whose skulls he had opened to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy. He took the opportunity (with their permission and cooperation) to do the tests recording on the surface of the brain – not in the service of epilepsy but in the service of stroke patients. He told me he thought that there was almost a moral obligation to do research on human brains in this way while you have the opportunity. I couldn’t agree more.
November 06, 2007
SfN: Social butterfly
I’m sure you’ll consider it an entirely selfless act on my part to put in an appearance at various social events in order to give those of you who couldn’t make it to SfN an idea of how well neuroscientists like to party. So here’s a rundown of just a few of them. Let me assure you that my attendance was definitely not related to the copious amounts of free food. Ahem.
SfN: clocking in
It seems like everyone has discovered circadian biology. Pharmacologists (disclosure – I am a pharmacologist) have always known the power of the time of day. But experimenters in other disciplines rarely take circadian rhythms into serious account. At best they may decide to test human subjects ‘in the morning’ as a sort of lip service. But morning to an early chronotype who rises to go jogging at 5 am is not the same as morning to a late chronotype who prefers to get up at 11 am.
The new awareness is thankfully permeating loads of areas in neuroscience, though I wonder if the balance has not tipped towards exaggeration. Yesterday we heard that sleep deprivation in today’s society may be the root cause of the epidemic of obesity in western countries, particularly the US. There’s fantastic new work showing disturbances of the clocks that are present and ticking in every individual cell including those in tissues involved in metabolism. Upset that rhythm in relevant tissues, and metabolism will be disturbed. But isn’t that a long way from insisting on a causal link with obesity?
Today we heard that sleep and circadian rhythms may be an integral part of the disease process of addiction. Whether it will turn out to be fundamental remains to be seen. But it’s intriguing to learn that drugs like cocaine affect clock genes which also regulate dopamine, the key neurotransmitter in reward.
November 05, 2007
SfN: Get yourself connected
With some trepidation, because equations and their ilk usually make me feel distinctly unwell, I ventured (along with several hundred others) to the featured lecture yesterday evening on neural networks, and what computers can offer neuroscience. And with relief, I’m happy to report it was really rather inspiring.
Maybe it was the palpable and infectious enthusiasm of the speaker, MIT’s Sebastian Seung. Accustomed to hearing about how computer scientists are being inspired to create ever faster machines based on how the brain crunches data, the nub of his own talk, as he phrased it in the Kennedy-esque finale – was: “ask not what the brain can do for computers – ask what computers can do for the brain.”
sfn: sophistication in the brain stem
The circus of the Society of Neuroscience meeting is upon us. San Diego, with no residual smell of burning in the air. I’m milling around the cavernous conference centre – actually one of the more attractive ones of this size – with over 30,000 other delegates, wondering how to choose between the parallel sessions. But there’s a feeling of famine rather than plenty – the awareness of just how much you are missing by going to one particular session.
One of the coolest things I heard today was about the non-uniformity of responsiveness of serotonergic neurons in the raphe nucleus, which is in the brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain.
Nearly all serotonin-releasing neurons in the brain emerge from this nucleus. These neurons have been implicated in all sorts of pathological behaviours – depression, aggression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders.
You wonder how serotonin is able to control so many diverse behaviours, but you don’t really expect to find the answer in the brains stem, Zachary Mainen from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory told me. So when he started to do single cell recordings from individual neurons in the raphe nucleus in mice performing a complex behaviour test, he expected to see each of them firing in the same, signature way - no matter whether the mouse was making a decision, searching for a reward, drinking, or just moving. But it wasn;t the case. He found different neurons responded quite independently to the different behaviours.
So cells right down deep in the unsophisticated brain stem, from where it is difficult to record, are possibly tuned for a limited range of tasks. Cool.
November 04, 2007
SfN: The traumas of transit - and it's not just the jetlag
A lot of people have come a lot of miles to attend this year’s SfN in San Diego. So perhaps I had travel in mind when I started off with a couple of posters loosely related to going places – admittedly on rather different scales…
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November 01, 2007
Society for Neuroscience, 2007
Alison Abbott and Kerri Smith will be sending back diary reports from this meeting in San Diego from Sunday 4 November. Check back here for updates.
Meanwhile, you may be interested to read what the society has to say on the effect of wildfires on the region:
"When Neuroscience 2007 kicks off on Saturday in San Diego, attendees can expect another highly rewarding, and safe, meeting. The convention center, downtown, and airport remain open and fully active, while our presence will provide business revenue that helps the region rebuild. Crews continue to make progress on the few fires remaining in outlying areas, and air quality, which remained in the "good" category downtown during the worst of the fires, has continued to improve in other areas as well."
October 18, 2006
SfN: Good news at last
This week I've learnt about Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS and Huntington's. Then there was autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I've blogged on suicide and child abuse. So it's some relief to end the conference blog with a poster that has the excellent title of "No disease in the brain of a 115-year-old woman".
SfN: don't shout at the kids
Can verbal abuse to a child can be as damaging in later life as some forms of sexual abuse? Apparently so. The signs of serious criticism and shouting can even show up as long-term changes in the brain, according to a study presented here.
October 17, 2006
SfN: location, location, location
Atlanta was never the first choice. The SFN annual meeting has met in New Orleans every three years, and 2006 was again New Orleans’ turn after San Diego and Washington DC.
But then, Katrina struck, and the society decided last year to move the 2006 meeting to Atlanta. Fair enough.
But the society won’t be returning to New Orleans any time soon, instead meeting in November 2009 in Chicago. Weather considerations aside (they don’t call Chicago the Windy City for nothing), some say the society has rashly abandoned New Orleans just when it needs the economic boost large conferences can bring.
A few enterprising young scientists here took matters into their own hands and began handing out stickers saying “New Orleans for 2009”, which they urged attendees to affix to their badges. Sadly, they don’t seem to have made much headway. Few attendees have seen them and even fewer are wearing the stickers. Looks like it will be blues, not jazz, in 2009 after all.
Apoorva Mandavilli
News editor, Nature Medicine
[posted on her behalf by Nicola Jones]
SfN: drop in numbers
There are 25,651 people at the Society for Neuroscience conference this year. Sounds like a lot. But it’s actually a solid drop from last year’s 35,000 attendees—and it shows.
The normally overflowing conference halls are emptier. The lines at the food stalls are a bit shorter. Even in the press room, there are fewer journalists banging away at their keyboards.
Why? Last November’s meeting in Washington DC “was in a different location, it was a different time of year, and the Dalai Lama was a big draw. You can’t discount that,” says Joe Carey, the society’s senior director of communications.
A whopping 14,000 people listened to the Dalai Lama, who last year inaugurated the special Science & Society series. This year’s speaker, architect Frank Gehry, attracted considerably fewer people. And Atlanta is no match for the attractions of San Diego or New Orleans, where past meetings were held.
But that’s not the whole story. Judging by the most common refrain in the hallways here, the real reason is obvious: money. The NIH pay line just dropped to an abysmal 7% and most scientists simply can’t afford to be here.
The average age for someone to win their first independent grant is now 44, prompting the society’s president to announce rather dramatically (at the press breakfast on Sunday), “If the young people don't get the grants, all of us will get old and there'll be no science.” Still, the 25,651 here does include a lot of young grad students and postdocs.
Apoorva Mandavilli
News editor, Nature Medicine
[posted by Nicola Jones on her behalf]
October 16, 2006
SfN: The history man
There are lots of shiny high-tech stands here selling equipment that can track the movement of lab animals or peer into their brains. Sitting a little oddly amongst them is John Gach's stand. He's selling old scientific textbooks, and is doing a very nice trade.
My favourite was his copy of the 1794 Zoonomia, in which Erasmus Darwin discusses ideas about evolution that later influenced his grandson's theory. It's yours for $1,750. Pricey, but there were others that would set you back more. A copy of a monograph by Sigmund Freud on child neurology, signed by the author, is listed at $5,000.
SfN: How to get mice drunk
Mice don't like to booze. That's a problem, since it means that it's hard to use them to study alcohol dependence. But maybe not a problem for much longer, since researchers were describing today how they managed to persuade mice to properly sloshed. The answer? Given them the liquour when the lights go down.
Brain changes may suggest suicide risk
Suicidal behaviour linked to serotonin receptors.
There is growing evidence that suicidal behaviour is a condition is its own right and not just a consequence of other psychiatric disorders, say brain researchers.
Read the story here.
October 15, 2006
SfN: Do you have synesthesia?
Synesthesia is one of those weird brain conditions that fascinates researchers and the public alike. For the uninitiated, synesthetes are people of sound mind and regular intelligence who, for reasons unknown, get their senses mixed up. They hear sounds when they read words, or see colours when they hear sounds. Or experience a change in temperature when they touch things. And so on: just about every possible combination of mixed-up senses has been reported by researchers who study synesthetes. But something about this work has always bugged me: how do the researchers know their subjects aren't just making it up?
Neuroscience 2006: Life without hamburgers is depressing
The Society for Neuroscience annual conference is, as usual, a big crowd-puller. Looking down the huge poster halls you get the impression you can see the curvature of the Earth. Well you could if the place wasn't totally heaving. I started by heading straight for a poster that I hoped was going to make me feel terribly self-satisfied.
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October 13, 2006
Society for Neuroscience
Join Jim Giles at this annual meeting of minds. He'll be sending diary reports back from Atlanta, Georgia, from 15-18 October. Check here for all his entries.
Nature also has a page devoted to this conference here.
And why not also visit the Nature Neuroscience gateway?
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