Society for Neuroscience Conference: Day 1

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.