Back from FENS

I came back from the 5th FENS meeting in Vienna on Thursday. I had arrived there with the most negative expectations of boring neuromedicine: posters and presentations full of Parkinson’s Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Which is exactly what happened! Brain diseases have, compared to experiments on healthy brains, relatively little to offer in terms of how brains work. Therefore, I’m always utterly bored and now, after so many years, seriously annoyed by large masses of narcissistic neuromedical researchers who think they are doing science.Nevertheless, what little real science was offered at FENS (which also was comparatively poorly organized, BTW, but not all too bad) actually was very exciting. The number of scientists also was surprisingly high, making the overwhelming mass of clinical research less of a nuissance. In particular, I got the idea for some very interesting, possibly groundbreaking experiments during one of the sessions, so maybe the confere...