I flew in Thursday night for the Friday auditory physiology satellite meeting organized by Xiaoqin Wang and Yale Cohen. It was an interesting meeting – in addition to posters and morning talks on new research findings, an afternoon session was focused exclusively on methods. A wide range of auditory neurophysiologists gave 10 minute slide presentations of training techniques and the details of their preps. It is widely acknowledged that training animals on auditory tasks tends to be harder than training them on visual tasks, which I think made everyone inclined to share tips and techniques.

Today brought the start of the main meeting. I also missed Gehry’s talk, but made it to the visual coding session, which featured some nice talks. The poster session was, as always, more about running into people than about absorbing many new results, but for me that is one of the best things about this meeting. You run into everyone…