I’ve attended the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) local Chapter conference in Waterville last week. It was a very small symposium of about 70 persons, where the researchers based in the local surrounding universities and Colleges working in Neurosciences shared their new projects. Since it doesn’t touch a large community, the meeting is generally attended by young researchers and undergraduate and graduate students. On my side, I wanted to meet up with new faces, the geographically close investigators in my field, and introduce myself.
There was some interesting papers, and I could interact with few people during the poster session, so it was relatively fruitful. Two seminars given in the plenary session by seniors were quite interesting:
One from Prof. Alan Rosenwasser, from University of Maine, talking about the discovery of the “non-image forming” visual system and the underlying cellular functional unit which explains a lot about how the light is important in setting our circadian rhythm, among other functions. The implications of understanding how this works is huge: the dysfunction of this system in our brain may be the trigger of many diseases such as seasonal affective disorder, migraine, glaucoma or sleep dysregulation of aging. If you wish to know more about this, there is a good review on the “Clinical implications of the melanopsin-based non-image-forming visual system”, by Ksendzovsky et al., Neurology. 2017 Mar 28; 88(13): 1282–1290.
The second talk was rather curious, dealing more about neuroscience philosophy: “K-conjecture and Human Brain Evolution”, by Prof. Leonard Kass, from University of Maine. Briefly, he first introduced his concept of the K-conjecture, a concept built to facilitate educational purposes among the population, in particular within the Sci-Fi community. Then, he explained the weak and strong forms of the K-Conjecture demonstrating that the human intelligence has reached a plateau and will not increase or improve with time, but that we may be the only creature with such a higher level of intelligence. We are the most advanced species and it has been thousands of years that our intelligence has been settled. What we do and how we as human being evolve is another story but our IQ cannot grow. (By the way, our IQ should also be measured otherwise to transcript our real intelligence, which may be composed by much more abilities than what is quantified in the test, but that’s a small part of the story.) The concept he was trying to explain was quite difficult to get in 30 minutes but I could feel something interesting behind, just to think about evolution a bit deeper … but if you wish to know more about this, you can have a look at this assay by the author: K-Conjecture – the future of Biology. https://www.medwinpublishers.com/IZAB/IZAB16000126.pdf. I wished there was a longer time for questions at the end of the talks. But somehow I am not sure we were ready for that kind of deep or provoking concept at this time of the day in this environment. Anyways, this was the kind of discussion I liked to have as a student, mostly around a table with a glass of wine… Santé!*
*”Santé” means “cheers” in french.
Zoë's Blog 