Impressions from the 2006 Society for Neuroscience Meeting
The 2006 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) took
place here in Atlanta
last Saturday to Wednesday. As a
“neurophilosopher” I felt I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to attend, so I
paid my $145 for membership in SfN so I could get the discounted registration
price of $220 to attend the meeting (and all I got was a cheap bag)! Here are a few impressions:
1) It’s
HUGE. Imagine the biggest APA Eastern
meeting you can. Now multiply it by
10. There were over 30,000 people at SfN
(and apparently this was a low turnout year).
The convention center room where they display posters is about 3
football fields by 1 football field (in the middle, hundreds of exhibitors were
selling lots of cool and expensive equipment).
There were thousands of posters in each of the 10 poster sessions,
concurrent with about 10 sessions full of 15-minute talks and some longer featured
lectures.
2) What
could so many people have to say about the brain? Almost all of it was “low-level” data—i.e.,
about how neurons work (lots of talk about chemicals), neural connections,
genes, and how the brains of rats and mice (sometimes monkeys and
invertebrates) work. Most of the
discussion of human brains was about neurobiological disorders, but most of
that work is focused on neurochemicals, genes, and mice/rats. So, the general approach is pretty
reductionistic. I’d estimate less than
5% was about human cognition (memory, emotion, reasoning, etc.) using human
subjects. Of course, almost all of these
studies use fMRI. (This still means
there were probably over 1000 posters or talks on fMRI studies of human
cognition.)
3) It
is hard to get excited (as a naturalistic philosopher interested in human
cognition) about most of these fMRI studies.
Why? Because most of them are
designed to show that when humans do X, brain regions A, B, C light up. So, for someone who believes that doing any
cognitive task will supervene on certain brain processes, this news is not very
illuminating, especially when most of the studies just replicate previous work
(e.g., lots of interesting psychological tasks involving deductive and
analogical reasoning, all showing that BA 10—an area in the front of the
frontal cortex—lights up). The data is interesting when it shows some
interesting “cross-over” effect (e.g., that areas associated with disgust are
active during certain types of moral reasoning or that motor cortex is active
when we think about performing an action or when we watch others perform an
action) or when it tries to offer a theoretical framework for why certain parts
of the brain are involved in certain functions (though, from what I saw, this
is rare; and there was very little discussion of evolution). The upshot is that it is hard to get really
interesting data. I say these mildly
disparaging things as I embark on an fMRI study with a psychologist here at GSU
(though we are trying to get some good “cross-over” effects and develop a
theoretical framework), so I’m not saying this work should not be done. But perhaps we philosophers should feel
pretty lucky that we can pick and choose the most interesting results from the
neurosciences without having to get our hands (too) dirty, and we get to
synthesize this information and apply it to the really big questions.
P.S. I think this post got buried, but it’s worth checking
out U.T. Place’s
lobsided brain.
.
