Neural networking: Yale and Hebb at the 37th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

From November 3 to November 7, 2007, more than 31,000 neuroscientists convened in San Diego, California, for the 37th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Formed in 1969, the society has not celebrated its 40th anniversary, yet membership has ballooned from the 500 inaugural members to more than 38,000. The scientists and physicians who attended this meeting brought a diversity of ideas and techniques to the society’s overarching goal of understanding the brain — from the cells that comprise it to the behaviors it directs. The conference was organized into eight themes: Development; Neural Excitability, Synapses, and Cellular Mechanisms; Disorders of the Nervous System; Sensory and Motor Systems; Homeostatic and Neuroendocrine Systems; Cognition and Behavior; Techniques in Neuroscience; and History and Teaching of Neuroscience. Yale maintained its presence at the 2007 meeting with students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty members giving 218 poster presentations, eight slide presentations, and four symposiums, spanning the breadth of all the above themes. The society’s overall range of membership was represented well by the diversity of Yale physicians and scientists in attendance. Our researchers came from 25 departments — Anesthesiology, Biomedical Engineering, Cell Biology, Comparative Medicine, Diagnostic Radiology, Endocrinology, Genetics, Immunobiology, Internal Medicine, Laboratory Medicine, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (MB&B), Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB), Neurobiology, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology (OB/GYN), Ophthalmology, Pediatrics, Physiology, Pharmacology, Psychiatry, Psychology, Public Health, and Surgery — as well as The Child Study Center, The Center for Neuroscience and Neuroregenerative Research (CNNR), and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. Neuroscience is not simply an inclusive field, but an integrative one. Much of the research presented by Yale scientists was the result of fruitful, interdepartmental collaboration. The synthesis of datasets from the wide range of fields mentioned above, and the emergent synergies, are essential for meaningful advancements in a field with such broad goals as neuroscience. Such an interdisciplinary gathering did not exist when Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb began working on his seminal book Organization of Behavior. In this issue’s review, Bilal Haider chronicles the work of Yale physiologists and psychologists who informed and contributed to the “dual-trace mechanism” postulated by Hebb in his 1949 book. As the author states, the book was no Zeus’ Athena and “did not burst forth fully formed.” Rather, it synthesized a remarkable body of research drawn from the fields of anatomy, physiology, and psychology, much of which was done at Yale. These lines of “neural network” research, undertaken at Yale in the 1930s and crystallized by Hebb in the late 1940s, are far from passe. All four of the Society for Neuroscience Special Presidential Lecturers discussed how emerging technologies will increase scientists’ abilities to compare existing neural data sets and perform rigorous, direct experiments testing neural network theories. “We are rapidly approaching this horizon as neuroscientists make use of an increasingly powerful arsenal for obtaining data — from the level of molecules to nervous systems — and engage in the arduous and challenging process of adapting and assembling neuroscience data at all scales of resolution and across disciplines into computerized databases,” Dr. Mark Ellisman, UCSD, said of the University of California, San Diego. As director of the National Institutes of Health-sponsored Biomedical Informatics Research Network, Ellisman intimately is involved in this pursuit. Indeed, the four scientists selected for this year’s Presidential Lecture series represent the kind of cooperation and cross-talk that precedes great breakthroughs. Dr. Karl Svoboda, HHMI, demonstrated his laboratory’s capabilities to record images, at the sub-cellular level in mice, of synapses and their calcium dynamics from time spans of milliseconds to months. Studies of this type still involve invasive methods, but new technologies are making more detailed studies of the living human brain possible, as well. Pioneering applications of diffusion MRI, Dr. Heidi Johanssen-Berg of the University of Oxford, showed data of the anatomical connections between human brain regions, previously unparalleled in detail. “Defining these pathways is crucial to our understanding of how the brain works, as the communications network dictates how we receive and evaluate information about the world and how we produce co-coordinated responses,” Johansen-Berg says. Lastly, Dr. Sebastian Seung, MIT, proposed new neural network theories that may augment or partially refute those set forth by Hebb. Yet the aim of today’s neuroscientists remains largely the same as Hebb’s and was eloquently stated by Dr. Ellisman: “A grand goal in neuroscience research is to understand how the interplay of structural, chemical, and electrical signals in nervous tissue gives rise to behavior.” Haider’s following review reveals the intellectual climate at Yale that heavily informed one of the most tremendously influential neuroscientific theories of the 20th century.