I am writing this memo while on an airplane, flying back from sunny San Diego. While definitely one of the highlights of the trip, the sunshine was not the reason of my visit to Southern California. Instead, I was there with hundreds of other auditory neuroscientists from all over the world (well, mostly from Europe and the US, to be precise) to attend the 44th MidWinter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO).