Behavioral neuroscience research at SfN Annual Meeting
What happened in Washington DC doesn’t stay in DC
More than 32,000 people attended this year’s Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington D.C. With this many people it is no surprise the range of topics is as vast as you can wrap your brain around: from teaching neuroscience to addiction studies, sports neuroscience, and behavioral neuroscience, among many more.
SfN makes a point of relating neuroscience to many different disciplines, but the main theme does more and more relate back to behavior. The Dialogues lecture is the first big lecture kicking off the annual meeting. In recent years topics have ranged from neuroscience as it relates to magic, and mental illness and awareness. This year the topic was Economics and Behavior. Each year, this main lecture has touched back onto human behavior. Most likely, at least in part, fuelled by this being relatable to all attendees, but it also reminds us that behavioral research is at the core of understanding biological functions. Whether animal behavior, or human behavior, SfN underlines how we continue to deepen our understanding of both, and how much work still needs to be done in this realm.
Behavioral neuroscience is an increasingly growing topic of interest to many scientists. Over the years of attending this meeting, a steady increase in the number of zebrafish themed posters can be noticed. However, a considerable number of these relate to pure biological studies, but the interest in zebrafish behavior does continue to grow. I presented a poster myself on this topic, and every year the interest in our work has increased, particularly with regards to the underlying methodology for the studies. I found that I spent an equal amount of time discussing the actual research, as I do going over the logistics of obtaining my data and the tools I use for data analysis.
In general, ideas from the theoretical talks at SfN are taken back to labs worldwide. As far as methods go, zebrafish in particular are still very much in need of standardized procedures. SfN might generate great research questions and ideas, but when it comes to translating those to new paradigms, you can draw from the expertise that comes together at an event like Measuring Behavior where behavioral neuroscientists, behavioral ecologists, and ethologists or developmental psychologists meet, just to name a few.