News from Japan
Well --- Japan is fantastic!! A lot of mental exertion, but amidst some beautiful scenery, and with some pretty cool people.
So:
To summarise the way the school's been going; the daily timetable is pretty hectic --- starts at 9:00 am, with a 3 hour lecture... followed by two hours for lunch and discussion, then another 3 hour lecture, followed by an hour of poster presentations, then dinner, then working on student projects until midnight or so....
That said, it has been incredibly fun, and I'm feeling more enthusiastic about science than I have for a long time --- it makes such a difference having loads of interested and interesting people around you...
The first lecture was by Susumu Tonegawa, a nobel prize winner (!) from MIT who's currently working on the formation and consolidation of memory. It certainly didn't feel like a three-hour talk...
We've also heard from
- my supervisor, Geoff Goodhill, who talked about the work in our lab... we got some interesting feedback... have to see what happens next...
- Jeff Wickens from Otaga, who showed some beautiful work on neural mechanisms of reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia.
- Bard Ermentrout who gave us an only slightly reddened random walk through phase-resetting curves and neural synchronisation. (Bard was the mathematician who made the first models of the visual hallucinations which are apparently experienced during LSD trips; he's lost several fingers and his hearing after stirring a pair of volatile chemicals slightly too vigorously as a kid, spouts off random rude limericks about everything and anything, and can turn most phase-plane diagrams into stories about godzilla, Mothra, and any other Japanese monsters (he apparently owns 14 of the 27 godzilla movies) ... this guy is very, very entertaining... utterly crazy)
- and Terry Sejnowski, who essentially started the field of computational neuroscience, who gave a very clear picture of the challenges of computational neuroscience, and need for new styles of thinking.
Ok... thanks for bearing with me through that... I'm just trying to get everything down...
Okinawa itself is a stunning place (though very hot and humid in summer; roughly equivalent to a Brisbane summer...); its in a coral reef, and the institute the summer school is based in sits right next to the beach. Corals, sea stars, hermit crabs, sea cucumbers, anemones, sea urchins and even a lion fish!!
anyway; I'm heading off to bed now!
So:
To summarise the way the school's been going; the daily timetable is pretty hectic --- starts at 9:00 am, with a 3 hour lecture... followed by two hours for lunch and discussion, then another 3 hour lecture, followed by an hour of poster presentations, then dinner, then working on student projects until midnight or so....
That said, it has been incredibly fun, and I'm feeling more enthusiastic about science than I have for a long time --- it makes such a difference having loads of interested and interesting people around you...
The first lecture was by Susumu Tonegawa, a nobel prize winner (!) from MIT who's currently working on the formation and consolidation of memory. It certainly didn't feel like a three-hour talk...
We've also heard from
- my supervisor, Geoff Goodhill, who talked about the work in our lab... we got some interesting feedback... have to see what happens next...
- Jeff Wickens from Otaga, who showed some beautiful work on neural mechanisms of reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia.
- Bard Ermentrout who gave us an only slightly reddened random walk through phase-resetting curves and neural synchronisation. (Bard was the mathematician who made the first models of the visual hallucinations which are apparently experienced during LSD trips; he's lost several fingers and his hearing after stirring a pair of volatile chemicals slightly too vigorously as a kid, spouts off random rude limericks about everything and anything, and can turn most phase-plane diagrams into stories about godzilla, Mothra, and any other Japanese monsters (he apparently owns 14 of the 27 godzilla movies) ... this guy is very, very entertaining... utterly crazy)
- and Terry Sejnowski, who essentially started the field of computational neuroscience, who gave a very clear picture of the challenges of computational neuroscience, and need for new styles of thinking.
Ok... thanks for bearing with me through that... I'm just trying to get everything down...
Okinawa itself is a stunning place (though very hot and humid in summer; roughly equivalent to a Brisbane summer...); its in a coral reef, and the institute the summer school is based in sits right next to the beach. Corals, sea stars, hermit crabs, sea cucumbers, anemones, sea urchins and even a lion fish!!
anyway; I'm heading off to bed now!