Brains, Brains, and More Brains: A Dispatch From the World's Largest Neuroscience Conference

If ever in an intimate moment of self-reflection you have considered just what is going on in your head when you wonder why you think, feel and act the way you do, then you should be here in New Orleans. At the annual conference for the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), 24,000 scientists from around the world are unveiling 16,000 posters of new research for five days.

It’s a whirlwind appropriately held in a city famous for jazz and booze. On day one you will need coffee. By day two you will need bourbon. Both on day three. And if by day four you still have your feet under you, by the end of day five you will be toasting out of a trumpet atop a balcony on Frenchman Street. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your brain on a neuroscience conference.

The only complaint you could lodge against SfN, one of the world’s largest conference in any science, is that it is too big. Indeed, the field is disparate. The SfN media hot-topics handout lists no less than 131 abstracts across twenty-six themes which is still a very sample of the whole which you can’t get your head around, much less your brain. Neuroscience is, loosely, the study of the brain. But if one were to compare it to a live band, the drummer is playing blues, the pianist is playing Mozart, the guitarist doesn’t seem to grasp volume control, the bassist is experimenting with bowing his string with a clarinet, and the clarinet player is chatting up the girl who does communications for the start-up throwing the social. Their only connection is music, or in this case, brains.

Not that a neuroscientist would say this outright. There is a sentiment that the way neuroscience is conveyed outside academia is getting out of hand. Recently the field has grown in public popularity and influence. Clearly this is good; more attention usually means more funding, and all humans have brains and would like them to function properly. But with popularity and influence come dilution. There has now arrived a swelling literature of bestselling, water-in-the-wine pop-science books that increasingly come under scrutiny for their dramatic conclusions and self-help interpretations. John Maunsell, editor of the Journal of Neuroscience, the field’s premier publication, told me at the media cocktail party that he’s concerned much of the true neuroscience is lost on its way to the general public.

“What distresses me is that the media only picks up the flashy stuff, when there is a lot of cool science being done that is not necessarily curing a disease or wrapping up the brain, because mostly we don’t know,” said Maunsell. Though complication is inevitable, he believes in remembering that complexity begins with simplicity.

“I recently read this great little book called Ignorance that said science is truly about the question you start with, not the methodology, and certainly not the result. That felt very natural to me,” Maunsell said. “When I teach my students I wish I start every semester with, this is everything we don’t know about the brain; now, this is what we do know. So how can we know more?”

As for the science on hand at SfN 2012, there is so very much. I could never hope to catch it all. While grabbing my first coffee on Saturday, Day One, I was counseled on the matter of coverage by a science writer for the Guardian who was refilling his cup not for the first time. With this much research on display, it’s hell to choose and worse to make decisions. (Perhaps not coincidentally, choice and decision making are popular research topics in neuroscience.) Muffin in hand he parted with advice: “All you can do is go about, look around, and and stay where you are interested.”

Research at the conference is presented in marquee lectures, topical symposia, and posters. The lectures are entertaining and the symposia are razor sharp but the poster presentations are the most flavorful. You can’t beat live communication. At a poster presentation, a researcher stands besides his work to field inquiries. (Yes, this does sound like a science fair.) Collaborative scientific research may be published yearlong, worldwide, and instantly accessed online, but a conference is where researchers can disagree with each other in person.

So after navigating the massive crowd in the corridors without spilling too much coffee, the feeling that hit me upon entering the convention center main gallery was the equivalent to the sudden rush of cool air one feels when walking through a narrow entrance into a high-ceiling cave with art on the walls.

In the main gallery posters are on display in long aisles is vast and there are no rickshaws, though one attendee was spotted riding a bicycle through the corridors and down the aisles of posters. Everywhere are posters. Posters about facial communication. Posters about unlearning fear. Posters about impulsivity. Somewhere there are posters about memory which will inform you why you cannot remember half of what you have seen. Each poster demanding your attention with aggressive titles, colorful imagery, and provocative mathematics. Each poster a dot in a pointillism painting.

Down one of the periphery aisles in the galley was a poster presenting a paper titled “Neural Random Utility,” a neuroeconomics study from New York University exploring for evidence in the brain of a random utility model, a model from economics that looks at how people choose one thing out of many when a clear advantage doesn’t exist, like in the proverbial crowded cereal aisle.

At the poster, one co-author dueled with a review editor. The paper had been submitted for publication to the American Economic Review and swiftly rejected by referees demanding changes. Let me play the devil’s advocate, said the review editor. Why are the errors so high? Why is utility not constant? Does this make any sense? Meanwhile a gathered crowd paid ferocious attention. The people at the conference tend to be a friendly lot, but at the same time they’re entirely impatient with hesitation and unforgiving of statistical insignificance. It was a tense scene that reminded a bystander of a bullfight he once saw in Mexico where the lead bullfighter was gored and his replacement came in to defeat the bull in style.

But then a disembodied voice sounded in the galley declaring poster viewing for the day to be over. Ultimately, many useful points had been addressed to aid its resubmission. The lighting inside dimmed as presenters removed their posters from their stands, rolled them under their arms, and shook hands during while they laughed about their advisors, lamented their funding, and filed out into the southern Louisiana dusk. But the science never stops. You keep a pen in your pocket because you never know if during dinner something about watching your friends determine what to order suddenly inspires an experiment.

Meanwhile in the press room, the journalists made no visible panic over deadlines; getting things right seemed more important. When working time was over the British press discussed where they would eat; one suggested that it was probably time they tackled the challenge of twenty dozen oysters. When your correspondent inquired whether this was possible and whether there was a poster at the conference that could inform us, he shook his head no, but noted that the mark of a good stomach smith is he finishes his plate, has nightmares, and eats the press room danish morning next nonetheless. His colleagues hummed in agreement.

This is the basic layout of a science conference, and more roughly, how science happens. A particular breed of people have an idea, find money to pursue it, try to get data, analyze the data, then write it all up. Then they meet their colleagues at a giant conference to knock heads and let loose. If it sounds like a very simple process (in theory) then you are correct. If it sounds very tedious, you’re also correct. But if you don’t mind tedium for the sake of discovery and a whole lot of hardcore geeking out on fresh research, then you’re ready for your first science conference.