Biomedical meetings and biomedical journals: vive la difference et vive la compagnie

Why do we continue to gather to meet to exchange medical knowledge more than 500 years after the invention of the printing press, 100 years after the telephone, and 20 years after the widespread use of email? We, the human race, have been transmitting information by multimedia--voice, face, and body language--into each other's ears and eyes (and noses) in caves around fires, at work, and on the trail, since well over 100 000 years ago. That communication is built on a foundation shared with many other primates and non-primate mammals. The origins of this communication are hundreds of millions of years old. Each newly input bit of this type of communication often needs to be processed immediately and responded to appropriately (food, hug, love, hit, bite, fight, and flight). The brain has had all this evolutionary time to build a complex, rich network of neurons to take it all in immediately, deal with it speedily, and save it for guidance in the future. (Also, 're-play' is not usually a choice.) Writing is only 5000 years old and comes in through only the eyes. (The ears and nose are excluded from these communications.) The earliest surviving paintings, the predecessors of writing, are less than 30 000 years old and are an exclusive product of human evolution. The brain has had less time to build a rich response centre. Re-reading is common. Only in a minority of instances (e.g. STOP sign, High Voltage) is an immediate response demanded. In essence, the two distinct modes of communication complement one another. Vive la difference. Vive la compagnie.

We witnessed this complementarity at the recent Laniado Hospital/Bildirici Diabetes Center meeting in Israel. The public presentations from the speaker's platform stirred the minds and souls of the audience. We remember the presenter, we recall the overall message (but not the details), and we were emotionally moved by what we heard. Now we are publishing these papers in a medical journal to use the other mode of communication-the written word (cool, slow, reader's convenience, skip, and re-play). Each alone is good--the two together produce an unexplained but exhilarating synergy and a long-term meld of the warm emotion and cool reason.