meeting report
Neuroscience 2014
npg
© 2015 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
15–19 November 2014 Walter E. Washington Convention Center Washington, DC Attendees: >31,000 Exhibiting companies: 537
Neuroscience 2014, which took place in Washington, DC, last November, was a busy international gathering of 31,000 people all focused on the science of the mind, brain and nervous system. It was the 44th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). More than 15,000 presentations covered research advances, new techniques and promising treatments for neurological conditions. Much of the program was geared toward neuroscience specialists, but as in the past, the conference was also a primary source of brain science and health news for the media and the public. Ten press conferences were held to highlight topics such as addiction, spinal cord injury, early-life development, diet and sleep. Many of the conference’s featured and special lectures were accessible and entertaining to neuroscientists and non-experts alike. These were held in a cavernous auditorium, beginning at lunchtime on Saturday, November 15, with Chef Bryan Voltaggio, who owns and operates several restaurants in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area and competed on television’s Top Chef. Voltaggio’s lecture “Food For Thought: Tastes, Aromas and Memories of Food” was part of SfN’s “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society” series, in which non-scientists are invited to address the attendees. Voltaggio described his culinary approach and thought process in creating dishes that go beyond satisfying diners to engage them and influence how they perceive food. From a temporary k itchen on stage, Voltaggio prepared a four-course meal for a panel of tasters, sometimes using equipment that would be equally at home in a science lab: water bath, liquid nitrogen, handheld torch. As he worked, he spoke about his goal for each dish, which was often to evoke a sensory experience, such as the salty tang of sea spray or the rustling of fallen leaves on the forest floor. Audience participation continued on Sunday, November 16, when Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA) presented the David Kopf Lecture on Neuroethics on “Mind, Brain, and the Ethics of Intergroup Behavior.” Banaji is a social psychologist who studies implicit association and hidden bias. She described how the concepts of group membership and affiliation shape our perceptions of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ and how these perceptions drive our choices in powerful and sometimes surprising ways. Observing people’s brain activity and behavior
LAB ANIMAL
can uncover strong but often hidden beliefs about group identities. Banaji d emonstrated this by involving the audience in a few rounds of implicit association testing, which revealed a bias in associating ‘career’ terms with ‘male’ terms more readily than with ‘female’ terms. In extensive testing across demographic groups, this bias crops up in 75% of men and 80% of women, Banaji said. Margaret M. McCarthy (University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore) carried on the discussion of gender with a special lecture titled “Surprising Origins of Sex Differences in the Brain.” She began by delivering a brief history of our understanding of sex differences in the spoken-word format of the theme song to the popular television program The Big Bang Theory, and her charismatic style invigorated the rest of her review of the m echanisms asculinization in the brain. Masculinization is not, as once of m thought, a strictly hormonal process but involves immune and neural signaling as well as epigenetic changes like d emethylation. In fact, McCarthy pointed out, demethylation alone, in the absence of hormone treatment, can bring about m asculinization. The evidence, she said, overthrows the “hegemony of hormones.” The revolutionary nature of scientific discovery was also emphasized on Tuesday, November 18, when Floyd E. Bloom (Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA) gave the Fred Kavli History of Neuroscience Lecture, “The Messengers of the Mind.” Bloom outlined the work leading to the identification of the various families of neurotransmitters and characterization of their cellular and molecular mechanisms of operation. “The process of science is human-based and often wrong in the short term,” he observed; “…and they were wrong” was a frequent refrain during his lecture. He contrasted the retrospective with comments on the future of neurotransmitter research. Bloom believes that an annotation s ystem, like that used to orchestrate music, is needed to understand and visually represent the intricacies of neurotransmission. The concepts of orchestration and intricacy are relevant not only to neuroscience as a discipline but also to Neuroscience 2014 as a conference, with concurrent sessions showcasing multiple interconnected facets of brain science.
Volume 44, No. 3 | MARCH 2015 81
Neuroscience 2014
npg
© 2015 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
15–19 November 2014 Walter E. Washington Convention Center Washington, DC Attendees: >31,000 Exhibiting companies: 537
Neuroscience 2014, which took place in Washington, DC, last November, was a busy international gathering of 31,000 people all focused on the science of the mind, brain and nervous system. It was the 44th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). More than 15,000 presentations covered research advances, new techniques and promising treatments for neurological conditions. Much of the program was geared toward neuroscience specialists, but as in the past, the conference was also a primary source of brain science and health news for the media and the public. Ten press conferences were held to highlight topics such as addiction, spinal cord injury, early-life development, diet and sleep. Many of the conference’s featured and special lectures were accessible and entertaining to neuroscientists and non-experts alike. These were held in a cavernous auditorium, beginning at lunchtime on Saturday, November 15, with Chef Bryan Voltaggio, who owns and operates several restaurants in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area and competed on television’s Top Chef. Voltaggio’s lecture “Food For Thought: Tastes, Aromas and Memories of Food” was part of SfN’s “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society” series, in which non-scientists are invited to address the attendees. Voltaggio described his culinary approach and thought process in creating dishes that go beyond satisfying diners to engage them and influence how they perceive food. From a temporary k itchen on stage, Voltaggio prepared a four-course meal for a panel of tasters, sometimes using equipment that would be equally at home in a science lab: water bath, liquid nitrogen, handheld torch. As he worked, he spoke about his goal for each dish, which was often to evoke a sensory experience, such as the salty tang of sea spray or the rustling of fallen leaves on the forest floor. Audience participation continued on Sunday, November 16, when Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA) presented the David Kopf Lecture on Neuroethics on “Mind, Brain, and the Ethics of Intergroup Behavior.” Banaji is a social psychologist who studies implicit association and hidden bias. She described how the concepts of group membership and affiliation shape our perceptions of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ and how these perceptions drive our choices in powerful and sometimes surprising ways. Observing people’s brain activity and behavior
LAB ANIMAL
can uncover strong but often hidden beliefs about group identities. Banaji d emonstrated this by involving the audience in a few rounds of implicit association testing, which revealed a bias in associating ‘career’ terms with ‘male’ terms more readily than with ‘female’ terms. In extensive testing across demographic groups, this bias crops up in 75% of men and 80% of women, Banaji said. Margaret M. McCarthy (University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore) carried on the discussion of gender with a special lecture titled “Surprising Origins of Sex Differences in the Brain.” She began by delivering a brief history of our understanding of sex differences in the spoken-word format of the theme song to the popular television program The Big Bang Theory, and her charismatic style invigorated the rest of her review of the m echanisms asculinization in the brain. Masculinization is not, as once of m thought, a strictly hormonal process but involves immune and neural signaling as well as epigenetic changes like d emethylation. In fact, McCarthy pointed out, demethylation alone, in the absence of hormone treatment, can bring about m asculinization. The evidence, she said, overthrows the “hegemony of hormones.” The revolutionary nature of scientific discovery was also emphasized on Tuesday, November 18, when Floyd E. Bloom (Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA) gave the Fred Kavli History of Neuroscience Lecture, “The Messengers of the Mind.” Bloom outlined the work leading to the identification of the various families of neurotransmitters and characterization of their cellular and molecular mechanisms of operation. “The process of science is human-based and often wrong in the short term,” he observed; “…and they were wrong” was a frequent refrain during his lecture. He contrasted the retrospective with comments on the future of neurotransmitter research. Bloom believes that an annotation s ystem, like that used to orchestrate music, is needed to understand and visually represent the intricacies of neurotransmission. The concepts of orchestration and intricacy are relevant not only to neuroscience as a discipline but also to Neuroscience 2014 as a conference, with concurrent sessions showcasing multiple interconnected facets of brain science.
Volume 44, No. 3 | MARCH 2015 81
