Summit
Keys to Successful Conferences
How do you describe the CNS Summit and what it offers — the word impossible springs to mind. Even the name can be a little misleading especially for medical folks who might look at that and think “Central Nervous System” but actually its stands for Collaborating for Novel Solutions
This coming year will be the 10th year of the event and it continues to get better — testing new ideas and concepts for conferences to make the event valuable on multiple levels. The history and experience reminds me a lot of friendships and how they develop — the first interaction can be awkward and uncertain but intuitively you get a sense that the person you are talking to is someone who will be a friend pretty quickly (science suggests it is not minutes or seconds but a 1/10th of a second). Over time the relationship deepens and you learn more, and understand more, and how much you enjoy working with, learning from, sharing and sometimes just hanging out. So it is with the CNS Summit or more frequently know as “Summit”.
Where else can you come to a conference and get clever new ideas and techniques on how to use your mobile phone camera in interesting and creative ways from the incredibly talented and inspiration photographer Asa Mathat (recommend instagram @AsaMathatto get a sense of his incredible lens on the world and people). He is a renowned Photographer to the stars, creator of the big pink ribbonand at Summit — photographer for attendees as well!).
(Hint — Don’t think in traditional planes of movement and use your volume buttons as triggers and when you reach the end of your panorama, just reverse direction to switch it off).
Areas Covered
It hard to categorize the conference into a bucket — it benefits from being not too big so as not to overwhelm but large enough to attract an impressive diversity of participants and speakers. The mix includes leaders from the Pharmaceutical Industry, digital health, medical and device companies and technology companies.
Insights continued from cancer survivors who parlayed their personal experiences to focus on taming the data mountain in healthcare and science, the pharmaceutical executive who nearly died from a side effect of a drug that had a life changing effect on the personal trajectory that allowed for a rethinking the model of industrial production of pharmaceuticals.
Of course for this Whisky Librarian, there is even a special highlight put on by Woody Woodaman — the whisky tasting that raises money for a fund set up in his wife’s name Betty Jean Memorial Scholarship Fund to support nurse training. The conference floor is always offers new concepts and technologies — everything from taste experiences to the highly popular hugging booth set up by friend and colleague Andrew Chacko.
Each year is an eye opening experience full of surprises that Amir Kalalithe conference Chief Curator keeps close to his chest like a proud parent who know’s he’s picked the best birthday gift for their child and can’t wait to reveal it.
This year there were many mind blowing presentations — for me “Breaking the Logjam in Medical Imaging” by Mary Lou Jepsenfrom Openwater that pushed the boundaries of wearables by offering a path to an MRI wearable. Sounds far fetched — not if you approach the problem with a different lens and understand that our photo sensor chips have reached a sensitivity of a micron — the wavelength of infrared. Combine this with the fact that our bodies are translucent to red and near infrared light — but red light scatters but this is not random, it is deterministic and reversible if you can record a hologram of it. So with some clever use of relatively old technology that allowed us to move from overhead foils to LCD projectors we are all accustomed to. This now allows the generation of ultrasound waves from small devices and using the change in phase of the light as it passes through the red light (you all know the doppler shift experiment you learnt in physics at school) they are now able to find vasculature at higher resolution than MRI and fMRI and even have additional capabilities to differentiate between oxygenated and non-oxygenated blood as achieved with the fMRI
But the resolution is now down to a few microns which is at the size of neurons, meaning they have the ability to see into our bodies at the detail of our nervous system… real time!
Combined with the early science that shows we can reconstruct what we are thinking and seeing based on analysis of our brain activity (Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies, Nature — pdf). Most exciting the project is driven by a challenge to deliver a low cost, better imaging solution, to everyone, given that 2/3 of humanity lacks access to imaging.
Final Conference Day
The highlight for me was the last day — which according to my research and discussions with others, is just like every other conference poorly attended with many people missing the best elements.
It included two amazing presentations by the compassionate and gentle Daniel Friedland(Leading Well from Within), the wonderful, funny and insightful Chris Hadnagy(Social Hackerand previous guest on my radio show) and Stephanie Paul’s fun and eye opening Improv experience and included Asa Mathat participating and recording the activities with his unique eye. This picture captures the fun and learning we had as we learnt and connected
So my Incremental step for you is set aside Oct 31 — Nov 3, 2019 for Summit 2109 (It is the 10th anniversary so I’m imagining Amir and the guiding council is thinking hard about making this event super special) and you to will have the learning opportunity and fun as you find a new friend in CNS Summit
And one more Incremental step — if you are taking the time to go to a conference, don’t head out before it finishes but rather plan to enjoy the last sessions where organizers often try to save the best till last.
