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Published 29 June 2014 by Stefano Sandrone

(Neuro)scientific thoughts on the way to Lindau

Meeting participant and guest blogger Stefano Sandrone on his thoughts while travelling to Lindau.

 

The journey to Lindau has started! Actually, it has already started when we submitted our application or have been nominated. The two little seahorses we have inside our brain are swimming back to the first time we have heard about Lindau (we all have two seahorses in our brain and they are called hyppocampi, the Greek name for seahorses).

It is a journey across time and space, countries and decades. In 1951, when the first Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting took place, Queen Elisabeth the II was not yet Queen and the Beatles and Rolling Stones still had to rock the world. By the way, many of the Nobel Laureates attending the 2014 meeting were teenagers. Think about how many outstanding scientists has the Lake of Constance seen. How many emotions, hopes, encounters, stories to tell! How many interweaving stories of life in such a little corner of Earth suspended between land and water! All this is already firing our synapses with passion and we will remember these emotions forever. Well done, seahorses!

But we should also thank the almonds in the brain: we have two of them as the amygdalae are key players in this emotional journey. As neurons in the brain, we will make new connections, we will meet new people and create new networks. Also, have you noticed that Mainau’s island looks like a brain?

 

mainaubrain_post

Long live to Lindau, long live to all the people that make this possible.

Stefano Sandrone

Stefano Sandrone (Canelli, Italy, 1988), Lindau Alumnus 2014, is a neuroscience PhD student at King’s College London. He studies neuroplasticity and connectional neuroanatomy and has a special interest in the history of neuroscience. In 2014, he has been selected as a young scientist for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Physiology or Medicine and included in Wired Magazine’s list of ’20 most promising Italians under 35’.