Astrid's Bio

Dear reader, my name is Astrid Heikens and I’m in the Cognitive Neuroscience track. Previous to this master I studied Psychobiology also at the University of Amsterdam. Not everything in this bachelor was evenly interesting, and I found that I was more attracted to the neuroscience site (or the biology site) than to the psychology site. Now you may ask why I didn’t sigh up for the Neuroscience track? Well, (maybe this is a prejudice) neuroscientists look only at the level of the cell, and since I find it very interesting how behavior can arise from all those little cells in the brain, for me, only looking at the level of the neuron is not enough. Besides that, techniques like fMRI and TMS have captured my interest during a workshop I followed in my bachelor, which are most attentive in the Cognitive Neuroscience track. Most exciting about this workshop was, of course, the fact that I was a subject myself: lying in the scanner for at least an hour and seeing my thumb move without doing it myself. What I learned during this workshop is, that although a lot is possible with new techniques, there are limitations. Stimulating the right brain area with TMS turned out to be not that easy. During my bachelor I also became interested in brain disorder, like neglect, prosopagnosia or Parkinson disease. This led me to write my bachelor thesis about Schizophrenia. My future plans are a very vague, because I do not know if I want to do something in the field of research. Since I have never had an internship, I do not know what to expect from doing research myself. That is why my future plans don’t go further than this master. I hope to gain as much as possible experience and knowledge during this master in order to make the right decision for my future.