Experiencing the Brain at the Society for Neuroscience

It was great to spend a few days this week at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. I was invited to a reunion of the Coyle Lab, folks who worked with Joe Coyle over the years. It was great to revisit scientific interests at the meeting and then renew friendships with great people who I see very rarely. After all, I live in the world of drug development and clinical trials which intersects with neuroscience only around areas of disease targets or drug mechanisms.

One of the fun aspects of the Coyle Lab reunion was acting as the night’s photographer. I stay away from event photography in general, having had some bad experiences both in photographing and being photographed. Thanks to the automation of the Nikon Creative Flash System, I was able to use off camera flash to more less consistently light a cavernous atrium room. I’m not sure I would volunteer again soon without some practice and learning of technique. Two lessons- Just like any other type of image capture, event photos need a subject, generally something happening of interest. Second, making something happen- like suggesting posing an groupings facilitates interesting interactions that can be the subject of photographs.

As for the meeting, the broad sweep of modern neuroscience is breathtaking. Elegant, in depth work goes on studying every level of organization from molecular, to cellular to structural to cognitive. As always, gaining the larger synthetic view is our ongoing challenge. A system is isolated, a factor is manipulated, a change is reported. Evidence is collected resulting in masses of data no single scientist could ever assimilate. For a bystander like myself, I feel the significance each scientist sees in their own set of experiments, contributing to a larger effort, but I can’t see the larger picture. Attending symposium talks where more senior scientists present their stories, wider context and significance are assumed or dismissed with a sentence or two.

I can’t help but think that we are doing something fundamentally wrong in building this scientific edifice. Findings get reported as news but are quickly forgotten, changing very little. While the money invested in biomedical science has grown exponentially, the yield of new drugs has been completely flat for 40 years now. As much as we’re able to watch cognition occurring in the brain, the way most of us experience our own thoughts, the actions of our own brains, is still mostly a Cartesian Dualism. We believe we are rational, abstract souls inhabiting bodies rather than understanding how mind is our subjective experience of our brains actions.

Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

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