How do you it's too much

after a full plate of indian food, two sodas and 4 talks later, i realised that the neurodinner is not quite the after work retreat i thought i was going into. maybe four talks in one go are a lot, even if they were straight from one lab. by the end of the whole thing i pretty much forgot everything except one or two problems i had with the data. and five minutes later, i could hardly remember them. there were about 100 questions raised, some were brilliant, but soon i found myself forgetting not only who asked the brilliant questions, but what they were. good for me. when you experience temporary brain death after a session like this, you know it's enough. it feels exactly like the day i took three bio finals.

some take home points though, out of the only residue memory i had of the talks.

1. everything really has to make biological sense. one of the speakers proposed options that were not biologically logical, and kept emphasising that those were merely "possibilities", or "extreme options". she reminded me of this quote i saw earlier today: "It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true". I thought the quote was duh when i read it in the morning, but now i see that there might be a point to it.

2. when you try to show a thing, you might want to use the most appropriate tool. for example, if a categorization of a population of cells is to be done based on genetic profile, an in situ might really be a better option than trying to record from them under different biochemical environments. so a colleague said, sometimes you are so in love with the technique you do that you forget the problems you're addressing. that, clearly should not be the case.