After an unusually rewarding and exciting SfN meeting in New Orleans with many ideas and new tools for the next experiments, I spent a day at my old lab in Houston, Texas to record some new, higher resolution videos of spontaneous biting in the marine snail Aplysia:



The day after I drove down to Texas A&M at Corpus Christi to visit my good friends Riccardo Mozzachiodi and his wife Marcy. They want to start the same kinds of recordings in Aplysia I did during my time in Houston, so we sat down and went through the technical details of recording from live, intact Aplysia snails. Conveniently, there is a JoVE video from another good friend, Hillel Chiel who pioneered this work. The technique I used was very similar to the one shown in this video (no embedding code available).

Finally, I flew to Sydney via Los Angeles to participate in a workshop on invertebrate cognition. The first speaker on the first day ("show and tell") was Max Coltheart describing his work on humans, including accounts of some very weird delusional patients. He was followed by another good friend, Martin Giurfa, who presented many different examples of components of cognition in insects. Third speaker was Sue Healy who talked about comparative cognition in vertebrate species. Next on was Jeremy Niven who talked about various examples of complex behavior in more and more miniaturized brains and their increasingly weird and exciting neurophysiology.

And now it's time for lunch and at 3pm I'm up with my talk so I don't expect to be blogging any more until tomorrow.