CNS Review
To be fair, I should say that I don't really disagree with Rabbi Lerner or find his messages inherently humorous; it's just that he comes on so strong.

In other news, the CNS conference was very exciting. I saw 2 former bosses, 2 former CSSA members, 1 coworker, 1 former thesis advisor, a bunch of people whose papers I've read or even cited, and several people I might want to work with in grad school. I had emailed one person in particular who told me where I could find him during the poster sessions to chat about grad schools. He seems like a great guy and gave me some good tips.

I went to 3 or 4 symposia and saw more posters than I can remember. It was really interesting to see the difference between speakers' styles. I think the ones whose talks were easiest to follow were conversational and humorous. Also, all that immersion in Cognitive Neuroscience topics has given me a better sense of the "outline" of the field, including what techniques are used and how, what kinds of questions are included, etc.

It looks like a lot of the work being done on reading right now is being done with ERP (event-related potentials; a kind of EEG). The reason is that reading processes happen in the brain much quicker than current functional imaging methods can capture. On the other hand, spatial resolution of EEG is pretty bad and, well, it's hard to know exactly what the signals are correlates of (whereas with fMRI we know the BOLD signal is related to the hemodynamic response--i.e. changes in cerebral blood flow related to changes in neural activity). I did talk to one woman who's studying reading with functional imaging.

Besides the overview of the field, probably one of the most important things about being at the conference for me was seeing the other researchers there--especially the grad students--to see if I could picture myself as one of them. There were a lot of women, which was reassuring, and a wide variation in dress and deportment.

Oops; I have to get ready to go tutor now. Next time I hope to blog about the vendors at CNS.
- posted by k @ 1:58 PM