Conferences do two different jobs and it is worth being clear which one you are there for. The talks are the visible part and the least important; the abstracts are usually online beforehand. What a conference actually provides is a compressed window in which people who read your work are in one room and willing to talk to you.
For this field the main venues are OHBM for human brain mapping, SfN for neuroscience broadly, and the disease- or method-specific meetings — AAIC, ISMRM, MICCAI — depending on where your work sits. Brainhack is a different format worth knowing about: collaborative project work rather than presentations, and unusually effective at turning a name you recognize into someone you have actually built something with. Several people in this book teach at Brainhack School.
Posters are undervalued. A talk is fifteen minutes of one-way transmission; a poster is two hours of conversation with people who chose to stop, and it produces more collaborations per unit effort than any other format. The failure mode is designing it like a paper — dense, complete, and unreadable at two metres. One finding, legible from a distance, with the detail held in reserve for the conversation.
Related¶
The job market — where hiring conversations often start
External resources — Brainhack School and related programs
Zettelkasten — keeping what you learn from a meeting