Where better to fry your brain than the British Neuroscience Association Festival of Neuroscience?

The various stall holders here insist that none of their equipment will fry your (or a mouse’s) brain, merely measure or stimulate it’s activity. This is more than some of the speakers can guarantee, but then that’s not their fault, I’ve the right to be here but no right to understand anything that’s being said.

As it turned out ‘Biased liganal signalling for k-opioid receptor agonists and antagonists’ turned out to be moderately comprehensible, possibly due to the near vertical learning curve encountered sitting through ‘mechanisms of mu-opioid receptor desentizaition and tolerence’ and ‘Ligand bias at mu-opiod receptor’.

What am I doing here? Well you may ask and well I too may ask. We are planning a ‘thing’ so broadly speaking I’m here to research this ‘thing’ but I’m not looking for the answer to a particular question, more after clues. I’m mostly just enjoying being in an entirely different world full of people who specialize in things I know nothing of.

Seminar 27: ‘Towards a causal understanding of motor learning in humans: a role for non-invative brain stimulation’ was less pharmacological and more psychological and manageable for the novice bystander.

Alon Chen gave an interesting plenary talk about the neuroscience of what may help or hinder recovery from acute stress and at the end of the day everyone got to hear from a real-live Nobel Laurette (whose research I had heard about before). May-Britt Moser researches into the brain’s mechanisms for representing space.

The easiest ‘take home’ item from the day was how at the of everyone’s talk they all put up a slide naming everyone in their team who had worked on the project, usually with a team photograph of them all looking happy together outside a university building. I will endeavor to adopt this approach in all future talks I give.