I'll keep that in mind for future neuro-y conferences. Most of what I care about is the biochemistry / medical angle of neurons, but it's hard not to wonder how exactly the brain is working through those processes. I had a teacher describe cognitive neuroscience last week as pre-paradigmatic last week. I think he hopes the BRAIN initiative has enough success to transform neuroscience is a similar manner to how the HGP did genetics -> genomics. But I'm not sure how much any of that can play into cracking the philosophy of cognition. I've kinda just taken to the "consciousness is an illusion" school of thought and otherwise neglected that world of questions.
Yeah, the two things I'm keeping my eye on there are in situ proteomics / transcriptomics and expansion microscopy. Both I know have gotten a lot of funding from the initiative and have a lot of potential to change unrelated fields. Maybe it'll be like the moon and we'll brag about all the other tech that fell out of the concentrated funding / innovation. But I also am pretty curious how much information people will be able to extract if / when the real connectomic datasets start rolling out.