After years of doing it I classified talks as of two types: first is where you know you want to listen to this person because that topic is already of great interest and you’re looking for the details. You already know how pluripotent stem cells came about but it was fun to hear Shinya Yamanaka describe the actual experiments and how they came about. Or perhaps it’s your competitors presenting their latest “ready to be public” findings where you’re trying to read between each line and dot in figures to guess what else they have up their sleeves they haven’t published yet.
The second category is of talks where you have some interest or hook but that’s it. Maybe it’s a Nobel laureate (I can assure you most Nobel talks are the most boring and useless ones you can go to). Maybe it’s an obscure topic but has some interesting keyword that intrigued you. So you just go there. Perhaps you get totally captivated in that talk, perhaps you learn some nuggets of information that you never knew about, but perhaps worst of all you zone out quickly because it’s too arcane or boring.
I still see the second category as the most rewarding. Maybe you’re bored in the talk, but that puts you in a place where you typically can’t leave, someone’s yapping and seeding your random thought generator with kernels of factoids that your imagination can run wild in. I often come out of these talks with other ideas only vaguely related. Some other times I’d have refined some of my own project ideas since I have nothing better to do.
None of these trials and tribulations have anything to gain from a contrived exercise to jot three things down though.