[trombonechamp]

Disclaimer: georgewfraser is my academic cousin.

Neuroscience research is huge and moving fast. Researchers have trouble keeping up with the bleeding edge in their sub-sub-field, let alone neuroscience as a whole. Conferences are one major way that most of us find out about new work.

Pre-covid, conferences were pretty exclusive and unwelcoming to non-researchers. However, now that conferences are all online due to covid, one thing I would recommend is going through the videos of old conferences to find something you are interested in. Then you can pause the video and look up any words or concepts which are unfamiliar. It may take a while to get through a talk, but you'll learn a lot this way. For example, Neuromatch is the big "mostly computational neuroscience" online conference: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcBKrxkfNv04R9PXLovjf5w/vid... Another formerly-in-person conference is Cosyne: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzOTbZTHTubFNjANAR33AAg/vid...

Heck, registration for Neuromatch is cheap so you can attend this year's conference if you want to: https://conference.neuromatch.io/