A few weeks ago I attended the Oregon Youth Neuroscience Conference (OYNC), hosted in Portland with speakers from OHSU and other institutions. The morning was organized around talks on Alzheimer’s disease and AI. The afternoon was run by NW Noggin, a nonprofit that does neuroscience outreach, and included hands-on activities and student-led presentations. One of those activities was holding a real human brain.
I want to start there, because it was the part I kept thinking about afterward.
Before you hold one, you already know what a brain looks like. You’ve seen diagrams, models, illustrations. So I expected it to feel familiar. It didn’t, really. What surprised me most was the structure. The folds were more defined than I anticipated — you could clearly see the gyri and sulci, the ridges and grooves that pack more surface area into a smaller space. That folding is essentially a spatial efficiency solution. A fully unfolded human cortex would be roughly the size of a large pizza. The folds allow it to fit inside a skull. Knowing that and actually seeing it are different things. You could also make out individual neural pathways running through the tissue, which made it feel less like an organ and more like infrastructure.
It’s a strange experience to hold something like that. I’m not sure I have a cleaner way to describe it than that.
The morning talks were focused on Alzheimer’s disease, specifically on something that has changed significantly in recent years: the ability to detect the disease in people who have no symptoms yet. Dr. Andrew Natonson and Antonia Gragg from OHSU spoke about this, and it was the part of the conference that stuck with me most intellectually.
For most of Alzheimer’s history as a diagnosed condition, it was identified only after someone was already experiencing cognitive decline. By that point, the underlying biology had been progressing for potentially a decade or more. What researchers now understand is that the disease has a long presymptomatic phase during which measurable changes are already occurring in the brain. The two main ones are the accumulation of beta-amyloid plaques and tau tangles, abnormal protein buildups that are strongly associated with how the disease progresses. These can now be detected through brain imaging, cerebrospinal fluid analysis, and more recently, blood tests. The FDA cleared the first blood test for Alzheimer’s diagnosis in May 2025, which is significant because it’s far less invasive and expensive than the alternatives.
Genetic markers are also part of the picture. The APOE ε4 allele is one of the most well-established risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t guarantee the disease, but it shifts the probability, and when combined with biomarker data, it helps researchers build a clearer profile of someone’s risk while they’re still asymptomatic. OHSU recently opened a new Alzheimer’s center in part because this area of research has moved quickly enough that clinical infrastructure is starting to catch up.
The interesting tension in all of this is that early detection only matters as much as the treatments available to act on it. Those remain limited. But the diagnostic picture getting sharper is still meaningful, both clinically and in terms of what a conversation with a doctor might look like for someone with a family history of the disease.
There was also a talk on AI, which I’ll be straightforward about: it didn’t connect with me the way the Alzheimer’s presentations did. I’m genuinely interested in AI, both technically and philosophically, so I’m not sure exactly why it didn’t land. Sometimes a presentation just doesn’t, and I don’t think it reflects much beyond that.
NW Noggin also had a demonstration involving electrodes that could trigger muscle contractions in someone’s arm, essentially allowing one person’s movement to be controlled externally. Worth mentioning, though the brain was what I kept coming back to.
I think what made holding it so interesting, in the context of a day spent talking about brain disease, is that it made something abstract feel concrete. Alzheimer’s research is ultimately about preserving the physical structure that holds memory, continuity, and identity. Sitting with that object in your hands makes that framing feel less like a rhetorical point and more like an actual description of what’s at stake.
OHSU is doing meaningful work in this space, and events like OYNC do a good job of making it accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise encounter it. I’m glad I went.
Sources + Further Reading
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