Well, I’m back. Not that there has ever been any danger of me getting stuck in San Diego. There’s something more than a little inhuman about its natives, at least the ones in the gaudy silk shirts with two (sometimes three) buttons undone, or the ones perpetually unsteady on their high heels, as if topheavy from all that makeup. Chain stores, all done in stucco, I just don’t get a sense of the soul of the place, or even the frenetic expansiveness that can stand in for a soul in a place like Los Angeles.

Santa Barbara, on the other hand, is unearthily beautiful, perched on those nearly vertical mountains and looking wistfully out toward the channel islands. Or the eastern side of the Santa Lucia range. One envies, driving at such speeds, the cowboys and gauchos who were forced to meander down those valleys, stopping every night beneath an unblemished sky on what surely could once have stood in for the green hills of paradise.

The conference itself was long and relatively uneventful. My poster on Saturday was well-received, and during the rest of the week I managed to refine my ideas for a postdoc at least a little. I caught up with my friends from Munich on Tuesday, and met a few people, including an editor and a journalist from Nature. Watched the Red Sox win games two and three. To be honest, I figured there was no way in hell they would sweep the series. So I didn’t listen to game four on the way back. Alex rode back with me; we talked about Bayesian inference, music, and language, and made it back to Berkeley just in time to go racing up Tunnel Road and watch the eclipse.

No doubt someone with more journalistic talent than me has described the alien universe of a scientific conference. A rather amusing image pops into my head just now of what the Council of Trent would have been like if it had been held in the San Diego conference center: everyone in their best red and black robes with little name tags around their neck and the poor Lutherans stuck in some dim corner of the convention hall squabbling over their posters with titles like “The Role of Consubstantiation in Grace: a Soteriological View”; meanwhile the non-schismatics would be giving very popular talks on “Saving Witches: Burn or Drown?”

But seriously. There is more than a little bit of a high priesthood in science. The people who give special lectures and symposia are more or less members of the establishment: they are the people who have enough results, a deep enough understanding of the field, and a solid enough reputation to make the sort of generalizations that at least speak to how the brain works. The short talks and posters are much more of a mixed bag. First off, one has to pass over a whole slew of posters on topics of dubious applicability in order to find a single surprising result. Even then, narrowness is the name of the game, and if you don’t work in the same tiny corner of the brain as the authors of the poster it can be hard to see the relevance, whether or not it’s there.

I, of course, have never let a lack of data stop me from generalizing and speculating. In fact, I don’t really have much taste for details. Nothing really suprises me on the level of details: spines can grow or not grow, receptors can be regulated in this way or that way. The simple fact is that the brain is going to do whatever it needs to do in order to do what it has to do. And there is precious little thought or effort going into the big, hard question: how does the brain work? Not even in the humblest of insects can we describe how the brain turns all of its various inputs into behavior.

I’ve realized that if I stay in science I have to start working on bigger questions. It’s the only way I’ll stay interested. Getting funded for this kind of work is notoriously difficult, unfortunately.