Meeting Buzsaki

So, how does everything goes with Gyorgy Buzsaki?

Well, mixed feelings.

This is one of the greatest scientific talk that I have ever experienced. The whole conference room is silence, entire silence. The talk is interesting, not because of showing some fantastic, funny while amazing things, but by the way it's clearly shown. The speaker just draw you into the deep world of his logical world. You can't deny anything because everything is so convincing, and because you just want to get into the new insight he opened to you try to imagine further. I'm just wondering what he can do in his next talk if he want to use different slides, because this series of slide is almost perfect. Perfectly clear and reasonable.

You might imagine the question section to be even hotter than last time's. Actually no. Paul Adams is also there, but he didn't question anything. Unusualy, this time's faculty tend to be silent, while students asked some questions. You know in normal times, the faculties came up with a lot of brilliant questions. But this time, few of them asked, and actually the ones even I can come up with an answer.

David say he seems not welcoming questions. Well, think over, that's seems true. Most of the seminar speakers I see, will specifically encourage people to ask and don't forget to give feedback to the questions they asked. He didn't do that specially. I'm sure he likes people asking questions. But the lecture he made, seems to give no chance for people to ask questions. I still remember when we went to talk with him about some questions after the talk, he would tell us that there's foible where where on his own.

Actually I didn't ask any questions except for asking if there are any way to get an discount on his book. :) Everyone got into laugh including him. But he did answer my questions seriously. Normally I asked a lot of questions during the one and a half hour discussion, but you know what, this time is mainly he asking us questions! He asked us why choose neuroscience rather any other scientific subjects, why neuroscience rather that other biology branches; what's the difference between people in biotechnology and us. He said I'm sure none of you come to this field aim to publish a paper. Silence this time, because everyone can't imagine how you can get graduated without publishments, how we can get our future jobs without a paper. Then he said do any one of you worry about what kind of position you'll get later, we don't care, right? Silence again, of course you don't need to worry about anything like this. But you are true, when we just choose this field, we don't think about papers, tenures -- only science.

All the questions he asked I never gave out the one he wanted. He gave an example that imagine there's 10billion treasure underneath somewhere of SB campus, what's the quickest way to get it. I said buy the whole campus then you can do whatever you want. Of course I mistook him, he is looking for a scientific answer. The securest way is to dig the campus square by square, but the quickest way is just random search. All through the whole lunch time is like this, he raised many questions, we are like headless flies, try to think and answer as much as possible but never got his clue.