i’ve never been to such an enormous meeting of people and minds… over 34,000 people turned up during the week long conference held in D.C. i wasn’t intending to go… i’d needed my travel allowance to get to USA (and flights were horrendously pricey in summer; i could have gone to some exotic country and back 2x with that amount i had to pay for my flight to come to USA plus all the fees just for the visa!!! madness) and there won’t be enough for signing up, submitting an abstract for a poster… and getting flights to be there… so i decided i’d go next time with a poster of my new work (which should hopefully give me time to let it evolve…) but everyone at the lab was heading off… and my supervisor here was surprised that i wasn’t heading there when he asked just 1 day before he was leaving for the event… well he never asked and i never did have the opportunity to mention it. it’s incredible how preoccupied people can get… i only wish i could be that ‘autistic’ sometimes… then again i am glad i’m not quite so. in anycase, i was told i should still try to go even when the whole thing was going to begin in 2 days for i will be reimbursed!
miracles do happen… apparently. after some frantic phone calls and hours of searching through the www… i found flights (i recommend Orbitz for their excellent service) and thanks to the Marriott points my brother had and a lot of luck and persistence i suppose, we got ourselves a room for 4 nights right smack in the center of d.c. 2 blocks from the convention center where the conference was held. it couldn’t have been better.
but i had mixed feelings about the whole thing nonetheless… i hate big events… especially when you have to wear a badge looped round your neck all day like a poor pet dog and be categorised as either a member or a non-member (?!?!?)… and my first conference experience in New York earlier this year wasn’t quite so enjoyable partly because i didn’t know many people and some lectures i had wanted to attend had been cancelled… i wasn’t sure if i’ll like this at all.
but it seems i did.
the SfN conference is really huge with multiple symposiums on-going every day spanning a myriad of themes for the different groups of interests. despite what ought to be a very inter-disciplinary field, neuroscience is nevertheless explored in very specific ways depending on the techniques used and the question put forth… and it is sometimes rather disconcerting when you have a very broad interest like yours truly who would be interested in other areas of the brain and other more general issues too and what people in those other fields might be working on to get fellow-researchers staring at you as if you should have some clever thing to say about what they’ve done. in some cases i have a few… in others i was totally in awe by what others have managed to demonstrate and sometimes i just don’t know what i should ask… oops.
there were also others that were studies in-progress which is a rather encouraging thing for me… since even 2 years into the PhD is not long enough at times to produce something earth-shatteringly novel… afterall, it will be a small piece in a continuous quilt-work fabric… sometimes you might have to even undo certain stitches and re-locate the pieces to another portion of the patch-work…
yet some applied research look very promising… and i am very lucky to hear some of the current work by those scientists who engage in rehabilitation and neuroprosthesis utilizing the findings and ideas developed by people at our lab… it’s an exciting field in many ways but it is also a very long and unpredictable journey at times… i must be totally mad to be doing research instead of a ‘normal’ 8-6 job…
in any case, i was intellectually stimulated and even got to enjoy a lovely piano receital by SfN Advocacy Awardee, Leon Fleischer, whom i was also fortunate to listen to a few weeks ago at the Ordway Center in St. Paul. i also managed to get into the main hall where the Dalai Lama gave his dialogue speech… it was perhaps a privilege to hear him speak but i was somewhat disappointed by the discrepancy of what he conversed and what was printed as the ‘expected’ theme of his dialogue in the programme… although there was only a smattering mention of meditation he did offered his opinions to questions pertaining to some very sensitive issues: compassion and animal research, drug-induced states of happiness and peace as well as our concept of consciousness or awareness. i never knew that he had such a good sense of humour… which is really quite refreshing for a religious icon. however, it is a little disturbing that his presence is probably more political than otherwise and even a little controversial… but it is wonderful that there is an initiative for dialogue between researchers and the wider community and society.
happy is she who also happened to meet almost half of her class from tuebingen at the meeting! and i was beginning to blame myself for this bizarre life-journey that torments me by giving me the opportunity to meet so many wonderful people and then tearing me away from them for years in a viscious cycle… utterly cruel… yet i met some of my friends again in d.c. and it’s a nice warm fuzzy feeling of familiarity… =c)
and apart from all the science-y bits of the past few days gone-by, i walked a lot which is great (exercise is a great thing for both the body and mind!), i got to see some green bits of d.c. with my brother and lianne, the smithsonian institute‘s museum of natural history, the national gallery of art whose east wing building that houses the modern art exhibits is designed by triangle-prism-loving I.M. Pei — one of my favourite architects!, getting intoxicated by too many cups of StarBucks coffee and chai lattes and enjoying my first lobster at the Legal Sea Foods courtesy of my brother… oh! and one good night’s rest without a bad tummy-ache or the wretched sounds of snoring… life can be beautiful sometimes!
pics courtesy of my bro & lianne
