Annual Renewal: Why the Society for Neuroscience Meeting Keeps Drawing Me Back

I went to my first Neuroscience Meeting as a second-year doctoral student. I had never attended a scientific conference before, but all the professors, who were also deep in preparations, gave me the impression that the event was something to be taken seriously. A kindly senior faculty member offered advice: “Learn everything you can,” he said, “but go to posters only if it's a topic you work on. If it's a new subject for you, just attend the big lectures. Otherwise, you'll get overwhelmed.” It was an excellent suggestion, which I have followed ever since. What loomed largest for me, however, was that I would present the first scientific results to emerge from my young advisor's new laboratory. During the weeks before the conference, I was initiated into the formidable ritual of making a Neuroscience poster, under the watchful eye of the departmental illustrator, who took her job seriously. I mounted glossy photographs of my scientific figures on dark brown cardstock with quarter-inch offsets; printed their titles and legends on ivory-colored woven paper; carefully cut large sections of twice-measured, taupe-colored poster board with an X-Acto knife; and finally spray-mounted all the pieces precisely onto the poster board. The result was a work of art that I found deeply satisfying. My advisor drilled me thoroughly in the presentation, yet I still did not really know what to expect.

Standing in front of my poster in the enormous hall well before the 8:00 A.M. session, I recalled my first experience of journal club, at which I had been both disappointed and angry when the paper under discussion had been torn to shreds. “How can I learn that way?” I had demanded of my advisor afterward, “I don't want to waste time reading the bad papers! Where are the good papers?” He courteously concealed any amusement and, shortly thereafter, handed me a list of about a dozen names. “I can't promise,” he said, “but if you read anything by these scientists, there's a high probability that the paper will be good.” At the time, I was struck by the realization—obvious in retrospect—that papers were written by people with characters and individuality. Each had the capacity, and therefore the responsibility, to conduct their studies rigorously, so that when journal clubs descended upon the resultant articles, the research could withstand both justified scrutiny and self-indulgent criticism. The extension of that thought was extraordinary: If my advisor and I worked hard enough, maybe someday even we could earn a place on a list like that. I clutched the paper as though it were a piece of gold, or a treasure map that told me where the gold was hidden, which was exactly what it was.

But now, at my first Neuroscience meeting, I realized that the poster session would be like a journal club on my own unfinished project. When my first visitor arrived, I began explaining with trepidation, but over the long morning of repeated presentations, my self-consciousness melted away. This was no journal-club experience of anonymous critique. Instead, I discovered the range of scientists who were curious about my data—professors and postdocs and fellow students, drawn by their interest in auditory systems or ion channels or synaptic transmission or some other intersection with my work that I hadn't known existed. Each brought a distinct reason for wanting to know what I was learning about the brain. It was a thrill to discover that my thesis research connected to such a variety of other minds and other science. It became a game to try to meet every individual at their own level of expertise and to speak meaningfully with each one. And imagine my surprise when some of the luminaries from my advisor's treasure-list actually showed up in human form and approached my poster, interested in what I had imagined to be inconsequential labors in my half-basement laboratory room! The exhilaration of my first presentation was unforgettable—not excepting the unexpected argument with a senior professor, who later became one of the most important figures in my scientific life.

Returning to my experiments after the meeting, I realized that something had changed. I no longer seemed to be working alone in my tiny room in the half-sunken lab. Hundreds of scientists were there with me—the dozens who had attended my poster and all the others whose results I had seen. I knew that the data I gleaned would speak to them, and the research they conducted all over the world would answer back to me. Their voices and faces floated in my memory, and I was in dialogue with each one of them. Science was real. The something that had changed was me.

I was fortunate that my first poster was well-attended, but not all my presentations enjoyed the same reception. Like many scientists, my research bobbed in and out of fashion over the years. As a postdoc, I prepared my first ten-minute talk, on my first truly independent discovery. Unlike the short-talk sessions held in gigantic halls packed with people, however, mine took place in a small room, high in the extremities of the convention center, and consisted of three disparate topics clumped together in a grab-bag of unclassified science. The twelve-person audience was composed almost entirely of the other speakers and my graduate school friends. Admittedly, my subject was arcane—“resurgent sodium current”—but the minuscule attendance made me both laugh and sigh inwardly while at the podium.

Afterward, as people dispersed, a man came hurrying into the room. His nametag revealed that he was one of the pioneers of ion channel biophysics, whose papers I admired greatly. “Is it over?” he asked in genuine dismay, adding that he had hoped to see the work from my postdoctoral advisor's lab. Trying not to grin, I said the figure printouts were in my bag, and I would be happy to tell him about the research. He accepted; we discussed; and I walked on air all day. Sometimes a single listener is enough.

When I started my own lab in 1999, I was eager for my own students to share the Neuroscience Meeting experience. In fact, I had gotten my job in part because my application had been picked out of the pile by a scientist just a few years older than I was, whom I came to know exclusively through informal discussions in the poster halls. The first Neuroscience presentation from my lab was delivered by an undergraduate. The poster-making process had of course changed drastically—the era of single-sheet printouts had begun—nevertheless, I was gratified to watch her undergo the same transformation as I had, nearly a decade earlier. “That was awesome!” she said after a full session of presentation, her inflection eloquently conveying her scientific high.

Another year, one of my graduate students slipped into my office after his first Annual Meeting and to tell me almost confidentially, “I learned that you've got to be a lot more serious than I've been if you want to make it as a scientist, don't you?” His approach to work changed overnight and launched him on a successful career. Another early student of mine returned from the conference surprised by a different discovery. “People know us,” she said, amazed. And just a few years ago, I listened with pleasure to a first-time presenter excitedly recounting his exchanges with authors of the papers he had read, as well as to a senior student reporting informal discussions that ultimately earned him a postdoc.

Post-pandemic, it has admittedly been harder for everyone to scare up the enthusiasm to engage in the labor of poster preparation, physical attendance, and meeting endurance. Through the explosion of media designed to facilitate communication, professors and trainees alike have become sated by information and interactions. And yet in my experience, most virtual formats are, even at their most effective, transactional: presenters focus on delivery; listeners focus on receipt. The Neuroscience Meeting repeatedly teaches me that only real life promotes the spontaneity, fluidity, and generosity of personal exchanges—whether in the poster halls, exhibit booths, or coffee lines—first one-on-one, then morphing into a small group discussion, next switching into a different one-on-one, then incorporating a trainee, afterward bringing in a person from a different field who happens to be walking by….

The feelings of kinship arising from those simple human connections matter to me because, like many scientists, my itinerant training prevented me from putting down roots; even after settling into professorship, I never lost a sense of transplantation, even in my now-hometown. Odd as it sounds, the Meeting has been the constant, a sort of Brigadoon appearing once a year, where I rediscover my extended clan. Together, we get our bearings once again, through endless variations on a familiar theme. There's the opportunity for the gossip with your friends on topics that can only be talked over in person, and the chance to smooth over scientific and interpersonal misunderstandings with colleagues that accrued during the year. There's the buzz around the unveiling of a particularly astounding breakthrough or the latest cool technology. There's the excitement of finding in the exhibit hall the tool that exactly suits your needs, and the leisurely scholarship that comes with browsing the publishers. There's the hopeful moment when you finally get clarity from a face-to-face confidential conversation with your funder or editor, and the day when a lunchtime chat turns into a full afternoon of brainstorming that changes your scientific trajectory. In short, there's a rich array of mind-opening and perspective-altering possibilities arising at every turn, in a way that smaller venues cannot provide. And there's also the undeniably humanizing experience of sharing real, physical, sensory space with colleagues known and unknown, whether it includes the remnants of a hurricane or the lights going out in the lecture hall.

A couple of years ago, I battled to convince a student, grown accustomed to the safety of webinars and Zoom, to present a Neuroscience poster. I prevailed, though not without some inner misgivings that the Meeting might have lost its magic for the modern trainee. A day or so into the conference, however, we ran into each other in the poster hall. With a kid-in-a-candy-store facial expression, the student unknowingly echoed my first undergraduate of more than two decades previously: “This is awesome!” adding in a laughingly begrudging concession, “Okay, okay, you were right!” before hurrying off to a symposium.

Science is both traditional and forward-looking: It continuously reaffirms the foundational, time-tested discoveries of the past, while straining into the future with a mix of crazy ideas and brilliant insights on which the advance of knowledge depends. The Neuroscience Meeting epitomizes that moment of intersection between past and future. For me, it is a sort of scientific New Year's, an event at which you share what you have done in the last year and celebrate with old friends from all periods of your life as well as new acquaintances whose names you may only know from the literature or whom you discover on site. You come back with intellectual party favors: nuggets of information that shape your own research, a sense of buoyancy from a few outstanding presentations that offered welcome inspiration, and a fresh realization that your own work really is the most exciting and meaningful in your own eyes. The resolutions that follow let you rededicate yourself to your science.

I know it sounds rosy, but I'm not just making it up. Year after year, I watch my trainees come back transformed, exuding justified pride in having conversed with experts without my stewardship and gained insights beyond my knowledge. They start educating me in a new voice, initiating their inevitable transitions from junior colleagues to independent scientists. They also radiate a renewed spirit of unity—a consciousness of who we are as a laboratory and what we are trying to achieve together.

And they reveal another collective feeling that extends past our own lab: Having shared a coffee or just a chat with a previously unmet peer or professor, they start referring to those scientists by their first names. Equipped with the ability to visualize those individuals doing research, they find they can suddenly remember literature that they had previously struggled to memorize, which fuels their confidence and their commitment. Just as I did after my inaugural Neuroscience Meeting in 1991, they start to speak, move, and act with the internal companionship of investigators all over the world. In doing so, they strengthen and perpetuate the scientific community.