I had the good fortune to attend one day of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting a couple of weekends ago. If you haven’t heard of this, it is the largest gathering of neuroscientists and general brain geeks on the planet. I’m talking about 30,000 of them packed in to one convention center. It’s quite a sight. It’s actually quite humbling, and is a reminder how little a neuroscience hobbyist like me really knows. But that being said, I got to go around and see some really interesting posters on work being done with optogenetics (exciting and silencing neurons using light) in Dr. Ed Boyden’s lab at MIT. I think this research has a ton of potential for brain-computer interfaces. Also, I got to talk to a PhD student in Neuroscience at USC. It was really interesting to hear about the work they are doing to investigate the hippocampus, with the eventual goal of creating a prosthetic hippocampus(!!!).
