anhinga_anhinga (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
anhinga_anhinga) wrote2005-05-19 11:26 pm
anhinga_anhinga) wrote2005-05-19 11:26 pm
Entry tags:
(no subject)
Trying to write about Ninth International Conference on Cognitive and Neural Systems (Schedule) and a new way to keep oneself awake.
A bit of whining first: the conferences like this one are fun, but pretty tough. One's schedule is dictated from the outside and is very dense, so one gets really tired. One tries to catch this and that bit of new cool information, while knowing (at least in my case) that only a small fraction will stay in the long term memory. Meanwhile, unanswered e-mail and LJ comments and unread LJ Friends page entries accumulate...
The coolest thing so far was the tutorial by Nancy Kopell, "Rhythms of the nervous system: Where do they come from? What are they good for?", and the assocated poster #22, Christoph Börgers, Steven Epstein, and Nancy Kopell, (Tufts University and Boston University), "Background gamma rhythmicity and attention in cortical local circuits". The progress in this field since 2001 is really impressive, and I'll try to present the details later (but not in this post).
There were a number of talks related to saccadic eye movements, which were of moderate interest to me, but in one of them it was mentioned that a time interval between a new object getting into a human visual field and the registration of the electrical impulse in the neck muscles is 80ms. This is, obviously, a case of subconscious processing (80ms is very fast), and the muscle reaction is "covert", that is, not strong enough to cause a movement, so it just primes the neck for the possible future turn.
However, the following occured to me. There is a standard problem of staying awake and alert during the long talks, and one of the tricks people use is self-massage of the neck. So I figured that given these data, merely doing more intense saccadic eye movement should stimulate the neck muscles and keep one alert and awake. This seemed to work, although it might have been merely a placebo effect... But I'll try to remember to do it next time I need to stay awake or to wake up.
OK, that's it for this post, and I might be bad with answering comments and e-mail during the next 2 days...
A bit of whining first: the conferences like this one are fun, but pretty tough. One's schedule is dictated from the outside and is very dense, so one gets really tired. One tries to catch this and that bit of new cool information, while knowing (at least in my case) that only a small fraction will stay in the long term memory. Meanwhile, unanswered e-mail and LJ comments and unread LJ Friends page entries accumulate...
The coolest thing so far was the tutorial by Nancy Kopell, "Rhythms of the nervous system: Where do they come from? What are they good for?", and the assocated poster #22, Christoph Börgers, Steven Epstein, and Nancy Kopell, (Tufts University and Boston University), "Background gamma rhythmicity and attention in cortical local circuits". The progress in this field since 2001 is really impressive, and I'll try to present the details later (but not in this post).
There were a number of talks related to saccadic eye movements, which were of moderate interest to me, but in one of them it was mentioned that a time interval between a new object getting into a human visual field and the registration of the electrical impulse in the neck muscles is 80ms. This is, obviously, a case of subconscious processing (80ms is very fast), and the muscle reaction is "covert", that is, not strong enough to cause a movement, so it just primes the neck for the possible future turn.
However, the following occured to me. There is a standard problem of staying awake and alert during the long talks, and one of the tricks people use is self-massage of the neck. So I figured that given these data, merely doing more intense saccadic eye movement should stimulate the neck muscles and keep one alert and awake. This seemed to work, although it might have been merely a placebo effect... But I'll try to remember to do it next time I need to stay awake or to wake up.
OK, that's it for this post, and I might be bad with answering comments and e-mail during the next 2 days...
no subject
staying awake and alert but rather taking a nap while
appearing to be awake and alert..
no subject
no subject
Why didn't you go to the Bio-IT conference?
no subject
First of all, I did not know about it ;-) No one told me ;-)
But now that you mentioned it, Google sent me to their Web site, and it looks like a huge commercial event, probably very expensive, packed with businessmen talking about multibillion-dollar projects, and full of
fakemarketingshitmaterials... I have no idea whether it is interesting at all, I was never inspired enough to go to an event with Expo as a part of the title...I can't imagine that I would go, given that it overlaps with a real scientific conference, with real scientists reporting real research...
What's your experience with Expo's?
no subject
But I also picked up a copy of Nature there and am now reading it. Some nice articles. Watching the bees dance, that kind of thing.
no subject
This is consistent with my experience. However, I did not observe it as part of any scientific experiment, it just came to me naturally.