Laura Hokkanen:
The INS Mid Year Meeting 2012 took place in Oslo Norway at the end of June. It was arranged by the Norwegian Neuropsychological Society in collaboration with the other Nordic societies, making it a Nordic meeting as well. The program was excellent, only problem remaining how to choose between the parallel sessions, all equally interesting. Many thanks to Erik Hessen, the chair of the meeting.
While we were there, Marianne Løvstad from the Norwegian society invited representatives from all Nordic societies to a lunch together. It’s been a long time since the chairs of each society met and shared local news, so it was good to catch up with what was going on in each country. Laura Hokkanen (that would be me) and Mervi Jehkonen participated from Finland. Only Iceland wasn’t represented, the rest of us exchanged email addresses and other contact details and made plans on how to better keep in touch in the future.
It was decided (again, as this really wasn’t a new idea but something that simply had forgotten along the way) that each society would share information on upcoming annual meetings or other seminars that might interest participants from other Nordic countries. An email list was formed and promises were made to send out links to whatever websites, blogs, facebook pages etc there might be. And yes, the Icelanders will of course be kept in the loop as well, their contact details were added to the list.
In that vein, I am writing this first blog post for our international audiences. Finnish Neuropsychological Society now has a blog that will include posts written by the chair, the secretary, or any willing board member and we are also inviting members to participate either by commenting the posts or writing themselves. We hope that this will create interaction between the members and the board, more than the traditional newsletter ever did. Some of the posts, like this one, will be in English so that also our international colleagues can follow what is going on in Finland. At the moment only members can comment on the blog. If you are a colleague however and want to drop us a line, you can find me the chair in twitter @laurahok
The first seminar btw, where we invite our Nordic friends to participate, will be held in Helsinki in October 15th when Prof Sergio Della Sala will be our guest speaker. Actually he gives two talks, starting at 10am, titled ‘Retroactive Interference as an Account for Pathological Forgetting’ and ‘Short-term memory binding: a cognitive marker of AD’. If you are a member of any Nordic neuropsychological society, you can contact your own society for details on how to participate.
More later, have a good start of the fall season everyone.
Laura Hokkanen