In November, I
attended the 2013 Society for Neuroscience Conference in San Diego, California. For
those who are unfamiliar with the conference, it’s an annual international gathering of
over 30,000 people – university professors, graduate and undergraduate
students, publishers, scientists, engineers, research institutions, companies,
and the like – who get together to discuss the latest news in neuroscience
during a 5-day conference. Overwhelmed yet?
I attended as a
representative of the Brigham Young University Neuroscience Lab. I went to
showcase the research my team and I have done on how people use their wrist.
(I’ll get into the details of my research later.) Since the conference was
packed to the brim with exciting and wondrous information, I have to share what
I learned.
This post will be
the first of four in the SfN13 series.
Society for Neuroscience 2013
Sunday, November 10
Day 1
Sunday wasn’t really the first day of the conference.
Saturday was. There were also pre-conference festivities, which started on
Wednesday. I didn’t show up until Sunday, so for me, this was day one.
Sunday was the big day, the day of my presentation! This was
my first time attending the Society for Neuroscience conference, and I was
already overwhelmed. The program consisted of 8 books, each about 150 pages.
Combined, it was as heavy and thick as two encyclopedias. Luckily my fiancé,
Joe, was with me, and we traded camel-duty throughout the day.
Where would we start? I needed a place to decipher Sunday’s
program (one of the books was dedicated solely to Sunday), so we moseyed into
the first lecture I could find. It was entitled:
“When Good Neurons Go
Bad: Dopamine Neuron Regulation and its Disruption in Psychiatric Disorders”
Speaker: Anthony A.
Grace, PhD
I knew immediately the subject matter would be over my head.
I’m an upper limb kind of girl, not a chemistry buff. But it didn’t matter.
Taking a moment to sit and plan was vital. I listened to Dr. Grace for about
one-third of the lecture, and I spent the other part scanning the program,
figuring out the layout of the convention center, determining what I wanted to
see, when things would take place, and where they were located. Needless to
say, I didn’t learn much from the lecture.
The only thing I learned from Dr. Grace’s lecture is that an
overactive hippocampus (a structure in your brain) causes overstimulation of
the dopamine structure. In other words, the hippocampus affects the amount of dopamine
released. Mental disorders can be traced to the level of activity in the
hippocampus. Too little activity is manifest as depression, for instance, while
too much activity is manifest as schizophrenia.
The lecture finished, and I had a game plan for the day. Mission
accomplished. The next exciting event was the graduate school fair.
Graduate School Fair
There was a smattering of maybe two-dozen colleges from
around the U.S. at the graduate school fair. I wanted to know the value of a
master’s or doctorate degree. What kind of careers will open with a graduate
degree? Will any opportunities close? Are the career options ones I am
interested in? Are they worth my time and money to go back to school?
It seems that further education can take you places, but
you’ll want to know – and know before
you enter graduate school – what your options are after graduation. Say a master’s will give you career options of A,
B, or C, and a PhD will lead to options D, E, F, or G. I would suggest a
personal reality check that you want any of the options A through G, and then
as early as you can, structure your education and experiences to heighten your
chances of landing a job in your desired career. If you don’t know what you
want to do (or enjoy doing) I can’t recommend blindly walking into a graduate
degree.
Finally, the moment I had been waiting for had arrived. I
scurried to the poster session to proudly showcase my research to the world
(manifest as a handful of on-lookers).
Sunday Afternoon
Poster Session
Let me explain the enormity of the poster sessions. There
were two poster sessions each day, a morning round (lasting from 8am to 12pm)
and an afternoon round (1pm-5pm). In the Sunday afternoon session alone, my
poster was 1 of 1,485. Posters were displayed all along the Exhibit Hall of the
San Diego Convention Center, a room that is over a mile long and has 525,701
square feet. To keep some level of organization in this titanic collection, the
posters were segregated by theme, topic, and subtopic.
Hanging in the theme, “Sensory and Motor Systems,” in the
topic, “Voluntary Motor Control,” and under the subtopic, “Finger and Grasp,” there
were 26 posters, including mine, explaining various facets of how people grip
objects.
My team’s poster stretched 4’x3’ and was entitled:
“Wrist Forces and Torques
during Activities of Daily Living”
Authors: A. L. Pando,
J. N. Hernandez, and S. K. Charles
Dr. Charles, director of the BYU Neuromechanics Lab (and a way
cool professor), met up with Joe and me at the beginning of the poster session.
(By the way, Joe was not associated with the research, except as my ever-long
and ever-sweet supporter. The third author is Josh Hernandez.) Dr. Charles and
I took turns standing by the poster and explaining our research to interested
on-lookers.
What is the purpose of
this research?
It’s known that repetitive strain injuries, such as carpal
tunnel, are caused when the wrist applies abnormal or excessive force. However,
those terms “abnormal” and “excessive” aren’t clearly defined because there is
no data on how people use their wrist regularly.
The purpose of this research is to quantify wrist activity
during activities of daily living (ADL). Values will be identified for wrist
muscle contraction, co-contraction, force, and wrist torque.
Activities of daily living are tasks done in everyday living
conditions. Such tasks involve food preparation (opening a can, using a
spatula), hygiene maintenance (brushing your teeth, combing your hair),
technology (typing on a keyboard, clicking a mouse), and other similar tasks.
They do not involve activities related to work, exercise, or hobbies.
How is this research
going to help?
Once normal levels of wrist activity are known, clinicians
and scientists will have all the values in a database to use as reference. The
database will be a springboard to understanding and treating biomechanical
disorders of the wrist. It will be useful in developing more personalized
treatments and more intelligent preventative designs. Ergonomics, prosthetics,
and physical therapy are just a few industries that would benefit.
Where can I find this
research?
Our work isn’t done. The data has been collected and is
being analyzed now. When it gets published, you can search for any of the
listed authors: Autumn L. Pando, Joshua N. Hernandez, or Steven K. Charles.
(More authors will be listed in the final publication.)
A steady stream of people asked about the poster. It was
exhilarating to talk with fellow motor control researchers! About half of the
people understood the nitty-gritty engineering details, and the other half at
least nodded politely during those parts. My hope is that everyone gained a
small appreciation of wrist research.
The close of the poster session was also the close of the first
conference day for me. Dr. Charles, Joe, and I wrapped up the poster and headed
out for dinner in the buzzing streets of downtown San Diego.
Stay tuned for the second part of the SfN13 series.
