Neuroscience 2026: what we're watching in Washington next week.

The Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting opens in Washington, D.C., on November 14 and runs through November 18 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and online. The society's July announcement projected approximately 20,000 attendees and more than 8,000 presentations, with brain-machine interfaces among the headline topics alongside GLP-1 agonists, dementia, psychiatric disorders and lifestyle effects on brain health. No one can follow a meeting of that size, so here is the short list for readers of this desk. The times below come from the preliminary program and may shift.

First is Itzhak Fried of UCLA, who lectures on Sunday, November 15, on "Mending the Mind: From Single Neurons to Memory Neuroprosthetics." Most neural interface coverage focuses on movement and speech, where the signal has an obvious target. Memory is a harder problem and a less crowded one, and it raises the question of what a device should restore when the function it supports is so distributed.

Second is the David Kopf Lecture on Neuroethics, given by Winston Chiong of UCSF on Tuesday morning, on what neuroscience can reveal about human values. The same day, the society's Advocacy Forum takes a congressional briefing on gene therapy to the Rayburn House Office Building, according to its list of what's new this year. With neural data law now moving through state legislatures, how scientists talk to lawmakers carries more weight than it did a few years ago.

Third is the tooling. The BRAIN Initiative Alliance holds its Toolmakers Showcase on Sunday evening at the Marriott Marquis, an informal way to see which instruments are about to reach ordinary labs. This year's lineup was not posted when we checked. A good example of the kind of tool that has appeared there is the Connectome 2.0 MRI scanner, listed at the 2023 event. According to the Martinos Center, its gradients reach 500 mT/m in amplitude and 600 T/m/s in slew rate, an 18-fold improvement over clinical systems, with a 72-channel head coil for living subjects. It took about five years to develop with BRAIN Initiative support, and it is being shared with outside researchers through pilot scan time and remote scanning.

That last point deserves attention. Electron-microscopy connectomics gives extraordinary detail in small volumes of dead tissue. Scanners like this push the other way, toward connectivity measured in living human brains, at much coarser resolution. Progress in brain mapping depends on bringing those two scales closer together, and on making the instruments available beyond the handful of sites that build them.

We will be reading the meeting for three things: human data on memory prostheses, any shift in how the field discusses mental privacy, and tools moving from showcase demo to shared infrastructure. Everything above comes from pre-meeting material, so treat it as a plan rather than a report.