On the agen­da are the 3rd Nordic Neu­ro­science Meet­ing and a vis­it to the new lab of group leader Annette Horstmann, who was recent­ly appoint­ed as an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Behav­ioral and Brain Sci­ences at the Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy and Logo­pe­dics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Helsin­ki. In a range of posts, we will share some of the high­lights of our visit.

We kicked off our last day at NNM with a ple­nary lec­ture by Lau­ra Col­gin, who came all the way from Austin, Texas, to deliv­er a lucid and engag­ing talk about the dif­fer­ent roles of fast and slow gam­ma waves in mem­o­ry encod­ing and retrieval. In a series of exper­i­ments, her lab showed that fast gam­ma waves code cur­rent spa­tial posi­tions dur­ing encod­ing, where­as slow gam­ma waves code future tra­jec­to­ries dur­ing suc­cess­ful retrieval. In the sym­po­sium that fol­lowed, we learned about dif­fer­ent ways to study atten­tion and work­ing mem­o­ry in rodents and human and non-human pri­mates from some of the biggest names on cam­pus, notably Marie Car­lén, Mikael Lundqvist, Kim­mo Alho, and Satu Palva.

After a well deserved lunch, the O’BRAIN lab took the floor with a whoop­ing sev­en posters on all things obe­si­ty. Vivid and con­struc­tive dis­cus­sions ensued, some of which might pos­si­bly even result in future col­lab­o­ra­tion. In an espe­cial­ly fruit­ful con­ver­sa­tion with Satu and Matias Pal­va, Nadine got to expe­ri­ence first hand the val­ue of a back and forth with experts on the cut­ting edge of the field of EEG research.

We round­ed off the day with a fast paced tour of Annette’s new sci­en­tif­ic home, which includes brand new TMS, MEG, EEG, and reac­tion time labs as well as an exten­sive and slight­ly sci-fi tun­nel sys­tem under the hos­pi­tal, which spans what feels like at least a square mile. Back out­side, the group dis­persed into the Helsin­ki after­noon, to pur­sue what­ev­er would set­tle those over­stim­u­lat­ed nerves of ours.

Maria Walt­mann, Nadine Her­zog, IFB AdiposityDiseases