Monkeyluv by Robert M. Sapolsky
Bugs in the Brain (pg.109)
Like most scientists, I attend professional meetings every now and then, and i recently returned from the annual meting of something called the Society for Neuroscience, an organization of most of Earth's brain researchers. Now, this is one of the more intellectually assaultive experiences that you can imagine. For one thing, there's about twenty-eight thousand of us science nerds jammed into one convention center, and this begins to feel pretty nutty after a while - for an entire week, go into any restaurant, elevator, bathroom, and the folks standing next to you will be having some animated discussion about squid axons Then there's finding out about the science itself. The meeting has fourteen thousand lectures and posters, a completely overwhelming amount of information. And of the subset of those posters that are essential for you to check, a bunch you never get to see because of the enthusiastic crowds in front of them, another turns out to be in some language you don't even recognize, and then there's the critical poster that reports every experiement you planned to do for the next five years. And amid this all, there's this shared realization that despite the zillions of us slaving away at the subject, we still know squat about how the brain works.
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that describes the meeting to a T! this is a great book btw. i don't read many books, but i thoroughly enjoyed this one. i actually laughed outloud on the subway many times while reading this book. ... i wonder if i've bumped into him ever...
Bugs in the Brain (pg.109)
Like most scientists, I attend professional meetings every now and then, and i recently returned from the annual meting of something called the Society for Neuroscience, an organization of most of Earth's brain researchers. Now, this is one of the more intellectually assaultive experiences that you can imagine. For one thing, there's about twenty-eight thousand of us science nerds jammed into one convention center, and this begins to feel pretty nutty after a while - for an entire week, go into any restaurant, elevator, bathroom, and the folks standing next to you will be having some animated discussion about squid axons Then there's finding out about the science itself. The meeting has fourteen thousand lectures and posters, a completely overwhelming amount of information. And of the subset of those posters that are essential for you to check, a bunch you never get to see because of the enthusiastic crowds in front of them, another turns out to be in some language you don't even recognize, and then there's the critical poster that reports every experiement you planned to do for the next five years. And amid this all, there's this shared realization that despite the zillions of us slaving away at the subject, we still know squat about how the brain works.
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that describes the meeting to a T! this is a great book btw. i don't read many books, but i thoroughly enjoyed this one. i actually laughed outloud on the subway many times while reading this book. ... i wonder if i've bumped into him ever...
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