[audio:http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/NEUROCONF.mp3|titles= Delaware Public Media's Eli Chen interviews UD professor of psychology Dayan Knox about the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting.]
The human brain is only three pounds, yet many scientists claim it’s the most complex object in the universe.
Last week, over 31,000 neuroscientists from around the globe gathered in D.C. for the 44th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience -- the largest scientific society in the world devoted to brain research.
At the conference, over 15,000 presentations provided insights on numerous topics. Researchers discussed the latest in brain mapping technologies and searching for the biological roots of autism and addiction; renown chef Bryan Voltaggio talked about food and memory; and a pair of scientists read from their book on zombie neuroscience -- Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?
Dayan Knox, a professor of psychology at University of Delaware, says that once you get past how vast and overwhelming the conference is, a researcher can learn a lot from his fellow colleagues.
“You get to see in a relatively small space how diverse and how expansive neuroscience is," said Knox. "It’s easy to go out of your comfort zone and see zombie science or someone who does only cellular work could look at a poster for behavioral neuroscience. So in that sense it brings a lot of people together.”
Knox’s experiments focus on understanding hormones that play an important role in stressful situations, whether it’s students preparing for a test to experiencing trauma in the battlefield.