Current Issues

short bio marte

2009-11-27T10:51:00.000-08:00

Hello
My name is Marte, I am 21 years old and I am from the Netherlands. Currently I am in the Cognitive Science track. I am born and raised in Alphen a/d Rijn where I specialized in ‘beta’ subjects during my High School education. Although I really liked biology and chemistry I started with a Bachelor in Dutch language and culture, because I was really into Dutch literature as well. During my bachelors I moved to Amsterdam, which was one of the best decisions I made in my life. After taking courses in (Dutch) linguistics I figured out that I was more into linguistics than into literature. I did a minor in Practical Philosophy and took electives in (Psycho)Linguistics. After that I wrote my Bachelor thesis on verb agreement with disjunctively conjoined subjects in Dutch. During this period I rediscovered my interest in Biology and Chemistry (especially in the brain) as well, so I decided to apply for the Brain and Cognitive science master.
In this block I will follow the courses Brain, Development Plasticity and Repair and Hot Topics in Linguistics and Cognition.
My ultimate goal is to combine the study of the biology of the brain with (psycho)linguistics, because I think the gap between the study of language and the study of the brain is too big. In order to do this I am very interested in studying children with SLI and aphasia patients.

Best,
Marte

Sicco's Bio

2009-11-09T14:28:00.000-08:00

What drives the choices of a young man cannot be stated in one blog. Furthermore it is hard to tell whether one blog can state the truth, but I might as well give it a try.

Born in a sleepy suburb invaginated by highways it seemed to me that I might as well move to the city. At first I was determined to study Philosophy, and the big question I wanted to answer was: what can we know? During a school project (on primate ethology) a friend of mine handed me a brochure about the Bachelor Psychobiology, she thought I might like it. Psychobiology was described as the science of the mind and behaviour and for some reason I immediately felt like I understood what that meant.

Of course! My initial question could be answered much easier if I would know how the think machine upstairs actually works!

Now, years later, I admire the high (naïve) expectancies I had. One does not grasp the biological basis of thought in a couple of years (not in centuries for that matter), but that doesn't make studying it less exciting. I had great fun during my Bachelor's and within three years it was all over again and (as is very usual in the Dutch educational system) once again I had to choose what I wanted to do next.

This proved to be much more of a challenge than I thought. Conveniently I put aside this difficult choice and decided to run for the student council of the university and the faculty and became a member of the council. Besides this I also chaired a committee (some of my classmates will remember) that organised a conference on Science and Religion. All of this put a great claim on my energy reserves (though I do have plenty) but I loved it.

Of course a year is through before you know it and before too long I again was confronted with the same choice I had to make a year before. The Master Brain and Cognitive Sciences attracted me in a way very similar to the Bachelor Psychobiology. A fresh and inspiring idea (and ideal) of integrating methods and theories in order to find new answers, and more importantly: new questions. Neuroscience was my track of choice, for obvious reasons.

Neuroscience Rules!

2009-10-30T03:10:00.001-07:00

Hi, i'm alexander. I was born in Greece 26 years ago, lived in Canada for 10 years (don't remember much though) and then back in Greece until last August. I finished high school when i was 20 (took me some time ha?) and decided to study Psychology so i can answer all the mysteries in my head, you know, why i'm like i am, how can I manipulate people, thing like that. After 5 years in the University of Crete, yes i studied on an island, i can't say i got the answers i was looking for, actually i think i have even more questions then before! The truth is that Psychology was very interesting but methods pretty much sucked. During my studies i had an internship as a school psychologist, it was great but i couldn't imagine my future in a job where i had to get up at 7. After that i started my thesis titled "Childrens drawings as an indicator for emotional and cognitive disorders". After 8 very difficult months of research and a huge fight with my professor i started my second thesis (well, i never finished my first so i don't know if i can call it second) titled "Adult attachment and parental behavior: Relations and the role of individual differences". After dispensing, calculating and analysing 200 questionnairs and coming to no conclusions, i realised that psychological methods couldn't give me any robust results about behavior. Surveys and questionnaires weren't efficient for me so i decided to try something new, cognitive neuroscience. Just started so i can't say much, although it seems that methods in cognitive neuroscience have some disadvantages as well. As for my future plans, well, i have no idea, not even sure if i want to be a researcher! Anyway, other than that, i like Holland, though not knowing the language is a disadvantage. None the less, it's seems like a great place, very different to Greece in many ways, especially the weather. Well that all for now, tune in next week for more!

Veerle's Bio

2009-10-20T01:27:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone!
My name is Veerle, 23 years old and imported from Woerden to Amsterdam 5 years ago. I'm in the Neuroscience track, and I'm actually somewhere between a first and second year master student.
After high school I chose to study psychobiology at the UvA because, like most psychobiologists, I don't like plants, but I do like biology! Furthermore, I liked it that this study was in a way broader than medical biology, because it involves psychology as well. However, during my bachelors I realized that I prefer biology over psychology. I kind of overreacted to this thought by starting a master Drug Innovation at Utrecht University (after a long fabulous trip to South-America of course :)), but soon after I started there, I began to miss the neurons and the UvA! I found out that I was already on the right place at the UvA, apperently the grass isn't always greener on the other side. Thanks to UvA's flexible administration, I was able to start in the middle of the year with the Neuroscience master. I did an internship at the Neurogenetics department at the Academical Medical Centre, which I really liked. During these 5 months, I was trying to find genetic mutations causing a neurodegenerative disease (pontocerebellar hypoplasia). Partly because of this internship I fell in love with science and research and I definately want to do a PhD after my masters.
At the moment I'm doing my second internship at the VU about how an unknown protein and ubiquitination are involved in learning and memory. Ooooh, magic!
Groetjes! Veerle

Ingeborg's Bio

2009-10-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!
I am Ingeborg and I'm in the cognitive science track. I have a background in cognitive & biological psychology. The reason way I decided to apply for this research master is twofold. First, I find it quite hard to chose between the many topics I find interesting, and therefore I really appreciate the broad nature of cognitive science. Second, I do know for sure that I want to do research and that I would like to teach.

During my bachelor, I did two (small) research projects. The first was in Berlin. I ran the control group of an experiment with Electrodermal activity (EDA). The subjects were exposed to emotionally valenced and neutral pictures while their skin conductance was measured. In Berlin I also collaborated on a study on sleep-deprivement, in which the participants were kept awake for 2 subsequent nights.
My bachelorthesis was on memory, more specifically on the testing effect. The participants had to learn the same stimuli in different ways, and were tested on their memory performance immediately and after a delay.
As a student assistent I thought statistics and several first year psychology courses, which I enjoyed doing.

At the moment I am involved in a research project with fMRI, in which the neuronal differences between bipolar and unipolar depressed patients is being studied.

In the future, I would like to do more research on memory & learning and factors that (I believe) might affect them; context, degree of attention and consciousness, personal relevance, etc.
In this master I also would like to learn several tools (programming, imaging techniques) to approach the same research questions from different angles. And since I am interested in many topics, I am curious for the interdisciplinary topics to be discussed :)

Leanne's

2009-10-12T02:43:00.001-07:00

Bio Esther van Duin

2009-10-07T08:30:00.001-07:00

Hi there!

My name is Esther van Duin, I’m from the Netherlands and in the NeuroScience track. I’m living in Amsterdam now for almost 4 years, but I’m raised in Amersfoort.
What human beings are and how we function has always interested me. Since high school, when I found out I had dyslexia, I wanted to know what was going on inside my own head (and what was going wrong, why I was reading slower than anybody else).
Furthermore, both my parents were working in a mental hospital, so I grew up hearing a lot about psychiatric patients and there syndromes.

After graduation I was really in doubt whether to go to the theatre / drama school (another passion) or not, but I was too scared to do the audition, so I decided to go to the University of Amsterdam to study psychobiology.
During my bachelor I was mainly interested in schizophrenia, drugs, stress, meditation, developmental disorders and I wrote my bachelor thesis (a research proposal) about “the neurobiology underlying dyslexia”
Besides my study activities I was also in the board of the study association of psychobiology, was student assistant for the education institute of psychobiology and head of the Amsterdam section of a homework assistance company.
Taken all of this together, it were three busy years, so after my graduation of the bachelor I decided to take a year off and went travelling through India, Nepal and South-East Asia. That was an amazing experience and made me think of my future plans.

Attending the master programme Brain and Cognitive Sciences was the outcome. I’m not finished with studying the brain and want to figure out if I would like to become a neuroscientist. I chose for the track NeuroScience because I was always interested in the causes of our behaviour. I’m not satisfied with a theoretical model, I want to know the exact genes that could be altered, the neurotransmitters that are involved and the brain areas that are activated. However I don’t want to stick to the small level of individual cells and want to make the leap to the higher levels of behaviour. That’s why I chose for an interdisciplinary master.

My vision for my future: doing interdisciplinary research on dyslexia, to figure out what is really going on inside my head……..

Tess' Bio

2009-10-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

Hi, my name is Tess den Uyl and I’m 22 years old and I am in the Cognitive Neuroscience track. I previously did a bachelor in Pyschobiology also at the University of Amsterdam. I liked this bachelor but I’m looking forward to doing some more practical work. I did a small internship at the end of my bachelor about visual consciousness. Though I enjoyed doing this internship the subject is not one of my main interests, but I do like working with techniques such as EEG.
I haven’t figured out entirely what subjects of cognitive neuroscience I like most, but I think psychopathology is really interesting, and I like the idea of doing research that could really help people. For my first research project I think I’m going to look into the direction of emotions. I did a small paper on facial expressions once and find many aspects of emotions very interesting.

de bio van io

2009-10-07T07:56:00.000-07:00

Hello people! I am io, 23 years old and I am French/American/Belgian.

I went to school in the USA and in France. I got my bachelors degree from the University of Utrecht in 2008 in molecular biology and environmental sciences. I did my bachelors thesis in the Philippines, measuring the anoxia of one of the small oceans there. I didn't quite know what I wanted to study for my Masters back then (although I did figure out that it was neither molecular biology nor earth sciences), so I took seven months off to work at the Laboratory of histology, neuroanatomy and neuropathology investigating Alzheimer's disease. This internship motivated me and interested me so much that I decided during that time to pursue studies in the field of neuroscience. After UvA I will most definetely do a PhD.

I enjoy a variety of things besides neuroscience :), such as playing the violin and the guitar, writing songs and poems, dancing, sailing, music festivals, travelling...

Eelke's last minute Bio

2009-10-07T07:52:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

My name is Eelke Brouwers and I’m 23 years old. Already 4 years ago I started my study (Psychobiology) here on the UvA. Although my preference changed between cognitive neuroscience and neuroscience over the last few years I finally made up my mind and chose for the cognitive neuroscience track.

Instead of choosing some real (and interesting) psychobiologic subject for my thesis I wanted to try something else (still regretting this impulsive thought btw). I chose communication and wrote a public campaign about the unnecessary use of antibiotics.

Fortunately I got to write a paper about addiction last year. In this paper I suggested a selective dopamine D3 receptor as a potential drug for tobacco addiction. Quite a biological paper, but really interesting.

I don’t have an internship yet, so can’t say much about that part, but I’m really looking forward to do some real research.

Cheers

Hannah's bio

2009-10-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

Hello,
My name is Hannah Eggink and I am in the track Neuroscience. Previous I did a bachelor in Psychobiology at the UvA. I spend my fifh semester on exchange in Singapore to broaden my view. It was a very enriching experience but not so much on neuroscience level. That I tried to find during my last semester with a short internship and bachelor thesis at the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience. Eventhough I really liked to work in the lab I didn't know if it would be the right path for me. Therefore I took a break year. I worked as a student assistent for the genetics practica for the first years, spent a month in Austria, and then decided I missed studying so went back to university. I didn't want to do anything with biology or neuroscience to see If I would miss it. Instead I did a course Islam, Big History and Science in Conflict. All very interesting and all but I missed the mysteries of the brain. So I chose this master.
I chose the Neuroscience track because I'm very interested in the molecular and cellular basis of our being. Isn't it fascinating that our thoughts are nothing more than chemical and electrical reactions? I am very keen to start an internship and do some real research myself.
See you all wednesday!

Jaspers' Bio (tutor)

2009-10-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

Hey Guys,
After one year of earth sciences at the UVA back in 1996, I decided this wasn't my cup of tea. I started a new study program called Beta Gamma. It was a quit experimental program combining natural and social sciences leading to one of twenty regular study programs..for me it was Psychology.

Psychonomics was the obvious choice for someone with a background in natural sciences and an interest in more fundamental questions. But after working on research projects for Maartje Raijmakers and Eric Jan Wagenmakers I discovered that I missed a connection with real world problems and I moved to more applied projects studying navigation in urban environments (thesis) and usability-design (research project). In this last project I worked at the Delft Technical University on the use of eye-tracking in usability testing (see reference below).

In 2004 I started working for the psychology department and in 2006 for the Institute for Interdisciplinary studies. First as a teacher of different courses on academic skills, cognition, human action and decision making. Later also as a trainer in didactic skills and as one of the program coordinators of the beta gamma bachelor.

In my spare time I like to take pictures,dj or cycle...

Boersema, T & Schegget, J ter (2003). Eye tracking in user tests. In D de Waard, KA Brookhuis, SM Sommer & WB Verwey (Eds.), Human factors in the age of virtual reality: Europe chapter of the human factors and ergonomics society (pp. 179-189). Maastricht: Shaker Publishing.

http://www.jts.dds.nl

Archontia's Bio

2009-10-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone! I'm Archontia and i am from Greece. Biology and chemistry were always my favorite classes in high school so for that reason I choose to do my 4-year bachelor in Biochemistry & Biotechnology, back in Greece. During my bachelor I had to do two internships, a short-duration one and a long-duration one. My short one was at the Hellenic Pasteur Institute, where I became familiar with the field of Neuroscience. During that time I've worked on laboratory mice in perspective of a study in neurodegenerative diseases. I was so fascinated by their work there so it was then when i realized that i wanted to work as a researcher in this field. My longer internship (one year!) was focused in a more molecural subject and the title of my research project was "Detection Study polymorphisms in mitochondrial tRNA genes in the modern human greek population". It was a very interesting subject as well, but Neurosciences had already won me over. But the possitive outcomes of my reaserch project was a) my participation in a biology conference, where I had to present my project (very enlightening experience!) And b) one publication in the Mitochondrion Magazine in May, 2008. Now, i am in the Neuroscience track and i am very pleased with it :-)! I am not exactly sure what my internships are going to be about quite yet, but i am guessing something that has to do with neurogenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. My future goal is after my graduation, to continue on a PhD and eventually work as a researcher in a big and ambitious (:-P) Research Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences somewhere in Europe.

Silja's story

2009-10-07T05:55:00.000-07:00

Hey :)

here comes a abbreviated summary of my last few years...

I was born in Germany, but I am also a proud citizen of the UK (that's because my dad is from Manchester).

When I was 16 I went to boarding school in France for a year. After graduating from school I went to Spain (wonderful Salamanca) for one year, as I was not sure what I wanted to study and learning Spanish seemed a nice option.

When coming back, I decided to go for Chemistry, so I spent one year studying Bio-Chemistry in München. It turned out to be not quite my thing (...I got annoyed with spending days in the lab doing titrations ...), so I changed my major to Social and Cognitive Psychology at the international Jacobs University in Bremen.

I had a great time at Jacobs, and did a lot of work in the Psychology Lab there. My professor Arvid Kappas (http://www.jacobs-university.de/hss/akappas/) is doing research on emotions and cognition. In one experiment we tested if physiological feedback from the body can influence emotional judgments of images (it seems it does!).

During my studies I also did two internships, both at the Max Planck Institute: once in Leipzig (2007) with the Tomasello group, and once in Berlin (2008) with the Gigerenzer group.

My interest in research are very wide, but most of all, I am interested in the bridging of physiological changes (in body and/or brain) and their effects on psychological perception, leading to action. For example, if X happens in your brain, how does this translate into what you feel and do?

In this context, I think studying certain psycho-pathologies can shed light. During my studies here at the UvA I would love to get involved in a research project on Autism, Perception & Interaction.

So far, the Brain & Cogntive Science Master seems to be a good path to take towards my research interests. Oh, and I love Amsterdam :)

BIO Anne Marije

2009-10-07T05:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Colleagues!
Well, I am Anne Marije, I am 22 years young and just started (how surprising) a master cognitive Neuroscience this September. The past three years I was doing my bachelor Psychobiology at the University of Amsterdam. I did really enjoyed this, but a really wanted to do some practical things with the knowledge I gained the last couple of years. So I am really looking forwards to my first internship.
I have got a broad interest within the cognitive neuroscience field (which is the track I am in), but I am slightly tending to the neuroscience part. I have written my bachelor thesis about alcohol addiction, which I was very enthusiastic about. But also other areas within the psychopathology (depression, schizophrenia) make me very ‘happy’.
Besides being a student I am really into music. I try to be a singer song writer, but when I attended a singer song writers contests last year, I did not win unfortunately. I did make someone cry… I don’t know if that is positive or negative.

Well.. I don’t know what to say more. Just ask me, if you have burning questions!

Greetz!

2009-10-07T05:38:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody, Im Lizet van Knippenberg, 23 years old and born in Amerfoort (the Netherlands).

In 2005 I started a Bachelor in Modern Greek Language and culture at the UvA, which I just finished. At first I wanted to study Life Sciences or Biomedical Sciences, but because I did not attend maths B courses, physics and chemistry in high school, I could not begin a study Life science. However, I still wanted to start studying directly after high school, so I decided to study Modern Greek, given my love for the Greek language and my regular visits to Greece.

While I was studying Modern Greek I noticed that some people learn a language much faster than other people. I wondered why somebody can learn a language in two years and speak it fluently after four years and why other people will never reach that level. What happens in the brain when a person is learning a language or learning something in general? Are there clear differences in the brain of fast L2 learners and slow(er) L2 learners? Is the language learning process the same as other learning processes? What is learning in general, is it just chemistry?

These are questions that crossed my mind the last two years. That’s why I attended the whole minor ‘Psychology of Language’, which I finished with a scientific research paper. The paper dealt with the effects of background music (familiar or non-familiar) on second language word learning. I also attended the whole Basic Programme Brain and Cognition and some courses in statistics like SPSS and Methods and Techniques. Next to these courses, I also attended Psychopathology, Psychophysics, Psychology of Development etc.

In the future I don’t really know what I want to do. I want to learn a lot more about the brain and the idea crossed my mind to do another BA in psychobiology. If I could make a desicion again, I would have studied this. I want to know a lot more about fMRI and PET scans etc, that’s why I’ll follow the courses, brain development, plasticity and repair & Neuroimaging 1.

Except all this study shit, I love to Dance (almost everything, jazz, modern, musical, ballet, but mostly hiphop and streetdance). Right now im not doing anything, but I will again before december! I also like to sing and to walk in the mountains. And the last couple of years I visited Greece a lot of times, I just love it there, the language, the people, culture, the eat habits, way of living.

2009-10-07T05:07:00.000-07:00

BIO Dafna

Hi everybody, my name is Dafna Windhorst. I'm 21 years old. Earlier this year I have finished my bachelor in Psychobiology, here at the UvA. Now I'm joining the Cognitive Neuroscience track.

I'm really interested in psychopathology, for example the underlying mechanisms of autism, PTSD, Alzheimer etcetera. I wrote my bachelorthesis about a new possible treatment of schizophrenia by using agonists of acetyl choline muscarinic receptors. I'm looking forward to the research projects in order to figure out where I'm most interested in. Because my interests are still pretty broad, so I'll have to think about that!

See you later!

Nick's (quite) short bio

2009-10-07T04:39:00.000-07:00

Hey Everyone,

My name is Nick (just Nick) Raemaekers, I am 24 years old and I was born in the Netherlands.

I will skip the part were I was born and the first years of mental colonization during the primary- and high school years and head straight onto the last seven years. Directly after I graduated from high school I was not quite sure about what I wanted to do in life, but I didn't feel like traveling or "pissing about", so I started doing Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University in Eindhoven. After one year however, I realized that dealing with these types of issues would make me a very depressed person over time. Moreover -and I guess, more importantly- my interest in (composing) music and philosophy had grown to such extend that the time I spend reading philosophical works and playing various instruments began to take up most of my time.

The following year I mainly worked in a factory and played in a variety of bands, of which I could retrieve one link (http://ongekendtalent.nl/profile/16324?sort=desc&order=Titel). My teacher and mentor during this time and after, I am proud to say, is Joop Wolters (www.myspace.com/joopwolters), an amazing composer and multi-instrumentalist.

After this year, I went on studying Musicology in Utrecht. The main focus of this program, however, was on historiography and theoretical analysis of (Wester Art) music, whilst I was at the time more interested in philosophical and psychological topics related to music. Luckily, I ran into professor Clement who referred me to Roosevelt Academy.

The following three years I studied Psychology, Anthropology and Philosophy (of Religion) with a couple of electives in Neuroscience. Another benefit of RA was that I could combine an academic education with practical courses at the Conservatory of Tilburg (I studied Improvised/Jazz Guitar under the guidance of Peter Mingaars).

I was drawn to Cognitive Science mainly because of its broadness, interdisciplinary characteristics and because of the fact that interesting light can be shed on musical phenomena. During this Master programme I intend to study a variety of topics in the different courses (mostly focusing to Music/Language modeling and a tiny bit of Neuroscience). As for research projects, I am basically open to anything, since I believe that most topics can be related to musical perception in one way or another, but specifically I find sequential learning, implicit learning, and iterated learning models quite fascinating.

After this program I hope that I will be eligible to gain some first-hand research experience in the field of music cognition and perhaps even pursue a PhD in either Cognitive Science (e.g. in San Diego) or Philosohpy of Mind (e.g. at Warwic). If at some point in time I will be allowed to lead my own research it will most likely revolve around music composition and improvisation (creative/generative processes in music).

I hope this wasn't all too boring for you to read ;)

Take care,

Nick

Nora`s short Bio

2009-10-07T04:35:00.000-07:00

Hi you all!!

We are using the brain to analyze the brain…Funny actually, if you think about it. And what if the brain has secrets that it simply doesn’t want us to know???

I am Nora Karsten, I am from Hamburg, Germany, which is pretty much in the North of our country and only a six-hour-train-trip from Amsterdam. I have been living in Amsterdam for the last three years now. I did my Bachelor already here at the UvA. We started out with general Psychology but I soon understood that I wouldn’t find my happiness only in that domain. So, the first chance I got I specialized on clinical neuropsychology and did the basis program “Brain and Cognition”. And I got happy!!! No, seriously I realized that learning how mechanisms in the brain can effect normal behavior as well as create pathology really seems to be the most interesting thing to study.
What I am specially interested in, at least so far, is the pathology of Parkinson`s Disease. So, of course, in my Bachelor thesis I wrote about that. I wrote a review about the long term effects of globus pallidus and subthalamic nucleus stimulation (deep brain stimulation) for Parkinson`s patients. Actually I am trying to do my internship in Parkinson’s domain. So, if you have any suggestions or advices, let me know please!
What I also find very interesting, even though it is not so strongly related to cognitive neuroscience (that s the track I am in by the way), are the effects of stroke on behavior and specially brain functions. In the summer two years ago I did one of my many internships in a stroke-unit in a hospital in Hamburg and that was definitely a very precious experience for me. I learned a lot about strokes and their consequences, but I also realized that I really could enjoy working close with patients. So, what I imagine for the future is to combine research with clinical settings. Well, it is still a long way to go!

See you guys around!

Dion's Bio

2009-10-07T04:29:00.000-07:00

My name is Dion Richardson. I was born and raised in Haarlem (the Netherlands), and a little bit on St. Maarten. I still live in Haarlem while studying at the UvA, where I started a psychology bachelor 5 years ago. After two years I noticed that my interests (and skills) were more towards the biological aspect and decided to take a different direction. Trying to combine the two I decided to study psychobiology. The first year is almost the same as biology and biomedical sciences, which resulted in switching to biomedical science.

I did this to extend my knowledge on the molecular and cell level, making sure I knew the basics as good as possible. I was still studying psychology part-time, so I was kind of able to combine the two in a psycho-biological approach. During my bachelor in biomedical sciences I also made sure it was focused on neuroscience, choosing electives like neurobiology and neuropharmacology. I also decided to do an internship instead of writing a research proposal, so I would get a better idea of working in a lab. The internship was focused on a serotonin receptor (5-HT3R, a ligand-gated ion channel), and really gave me a good idea of what to expect in the future. To get some interdisciplinary input I also choose to do an honours-programme during my bachelor, which I enjoyed very much.

While finishing of my bio-medical science bachelor I decided to study Brain and Cognitive sciences, the neuroscience track, hoping to combine all of my interests. I just started my first research project for this master, working on the same receptor as I did during my bachelor, so we’ll see where things end up.

I really enjoy subjects like work and organizational psychology and intercultural competencies. For that reason there is a good chance that I will try to combine these interests in the future.

Eventually there are ambitions to combine a research background with different fields, however for the coming 6 years you will most likely spot me doing research in neuroscience.

Saša's Bio

2009-10-07T03:58:00.000-07:00

Originally I am from croatia, but since I was 8 I lived in Maastricht and that is where I finished high-school and continued with a bachelor in Molecular Life Sciences. This I did for a year after which I found out that I need to leave my home town and head in a different direction. I was always fascinated with human behavior, and the complicity of organisms in general. So I decided to go to Amsterdam where I did the psychobiology bachelor, in my opinion an ideal combination of two fields in order to try and understand the whole picture better. My bachelor-project was a research proposal involving new ways to treat schizophrenia: ' The application of a new GlyT1 inhibitor; SSR504734 in a PCP induced schizophrenia rat model' . Under the supervision of Taco Werkman. Now I am part of the neuroscience track, and I like what I see. My internship will continue under the supervision of Taco, and this will involve Serotonergic modulation of dopamine and GABA inputs (to A9/A10 D2 neurons), while considering the role in antipsychotic drug efficacy; also related to schizophrenia.

My goal is to observe/learn/adapt, and hopefully participate in the day that we integrate technology in order to permanently enhance cognitive function of the brain, and finally start working in a more organized and efficient way. Cause lets face it.. the current brain really is overrated. We need more efficient processors to tackle the fundamental problems we are dealing with in our search for questions: this will save money, conflicts and most importantly time.

Then again ..the young folks have already discovered different non-permanent cognitive enhancers ..viva la revolution ! link ...are YOU a user ? ;)

jordi's bio

2009-10-07T02:30:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, my name is Jordi Wester, I am 24 years old and I live in Heemskerk.I followed my Bachelor Psychobiology here at the UvA. I chose this bachelor because I wanted to study both Medical Biology and Psychology, so this study was perfect. During my study I found out that the biological aspect of the study interested me the most. Therefore I currently study the master Brain and Cognitive Sciences: track Neuroscience. Right now my scientific interest is still very widespread, in other words I find almost everything interesting. Off course as a real student from the neuroscience track multiple cell intrigue me ;-). Like gliacells, which were neglected in scientific research for multiple years and still don’t get the attention you would expect. I these gliacells would be a great subject for mine internship, but I’m still orientating. If anyone wants to know more or knows a great place for an internship, please come and chat with me tonight during current issues or at kriterion.

Poppy's Bio

2009-10-07T00:44:00.001-07:00

I studied double majors in Psychology and Philosophy before travelling and working for a few years. I always planned to study further and after I moved to Amsterdam in Dec 08 the timing seemed perfect. I'm on the Cognitive Sciences Track in the Brain and Cognitive Science Research Masters. I'm really enjoying being back at University and we are studying some really interesting things to do with language acquisition and evolution, theory of mind, artificial intelligence and image representations in the brain/mind to name just a few. We are considering lots of recent theories of human cognition and having much interesting debate. I find the big philosophical picture fascinating and would now like to build on this and learn some practical research skills (e.g imaging techniques, cognitive psychometric testing, programming skills) so that I am employable in the future! I listen to heaps of podcasts (The 'brain science podcast' is especially good) and participate quite a lot in the forum over there. I'm personally really interested in hemispheric specialisation, visual and auditory perception, memory and neurocognitive aging. I really admire Dr Brenda Milner for the pioneering work on memory she did with HM.

AM's bio

2009-10-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! My name is Anne Maren Krüse and I’m in the Cognitive Science track. I did my bachelor in general linguistics here in Amsterdam and took some courses in psychology and argumentation. During three years of linguistics, I got asked very often what it exactly was that I was studying. I always explained that linguistics is a very broad field, touching different disciplines. This probably didn’t solve their question, because they always asked which discipline I was especially interested in. That would be everything that has to do with language and the brain and that’s why I chose to do this particular master. Out of everything that has got to do with language, the whole language and the brain issue fascinates me the most. Furthermore, music cognition and the evolution of language are also on top of my list of interests.
I have absolutely no clue what my internship is going to look like, nor what to do after this. But we’ll see what the future will bring!

Vincent

2009-10-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

My ventures into cognitive science started from a desire to tell a better story. I started out studying chemistry years ago, as I was intrigued by the existence of order in a world ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, while at the same time being too intimidated by the mathematical formalisms of physics to head into that direction. During my studies, which took place at both the University of Amsterdam and the Free University, I managed to get a better idea of the story of order. I learned about the formation of the elements, the nature of the chemical bond and the self-organization of molecules and molecular aggregates. At the top of this chain of ever-increasing complexity stood life or, as chemists like to abbreviate it, the cell.

The workings of the living cell remained my focus for some time. I followed various courses on biochemistry and molecular biology and dedicated my largest BSc internship to protein expression in photosynthetic cyanobacteria, in the lab of Hans Matthijs. During that internship and subsequent courses within a master's programme on biophysics, my awe of nature grew, as did my understanding of the story of life. There was one thing to this story, however, that I couldn't get my head around.

That thing was consciousness. I could see the first replicators emerging and I could see natural selection spewing forth great biodiversity, but I couldn't – and still can't – understand how matter produces mind. Call it writer's block, but it just seems like some magical step is necessary. Now I have no pretense of actually solving this hard problem, but the question of how to continue the story of life into the realm of the subjective intrigued me and brought me into this master's programme. This happened first through a great CSCA summer school, then through various courses on neurobiology and cognitive (neuro)science and finally through work I did at the lab of prof. dr. Cyriel Pennartz, where I joined drs. Marijn van Wingerden to investigate neuronal spiking and oscillations in orbitofrontal cortex and basically learned everything I know about brains.

In the cognitive neuroscience track, I hope to get a good understanding of the tools that are available to probe the brain, while also learning what questions (and answers!) philosophers and psychologists have come up concerning the mind. Ultimately, I would like to obtain a PhD position somewhere, pursuing any of the many research interests I have, such as addiction or social binding/love. If, as a side effect, this would lead to a grand eureka moment that allows me to tell a continuous story of how mind came to be, I will write a book about it.

Neuroscientists whose work I greatly appreciate are Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, for their work on integrating emotion in the cognitive framework and for communicating their ideas clearly to the broader audience.

Margareta

2009-10-06T12:47:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, I’m Margareta Calabrese, from Koeln, Germany.
I did my Bachelor in Psychology in Italy at the University of Bologna. The third year of my Bachelor I moved to Spain and I studied two semesters at the University of Valencia.
After one year I didn't want to go back to Italy so I decided to stay a bit more in Valencia and to make my internship in a communication school specialized in the diagnosis and treatment of children who have a disorder of the autistic spectrum. After the internship I collaborated in the preparation of a new project in the communication school: Pet-therapy with autistic children. My Bachelor thesis was about this project.
Looking for a Master programme in Neuropsychology I found the great Master programme in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and I applied for the Cognitive Neuroscience track. I wanted to do this Master because it represents the more scientific part of Psychology. Basically my background is quite different from what we are doing in the Master, even though I chose the more neurological direction within my bachelor degree. I'm fascinated by the complexity of the brain and I want to know a lot more about its mechanisms, how it works and what it does to make us what we are.
Here I am now in Amsterdam. I don't know yet where to do my internship, but I'm interested in Psychopathology and I would like to do some research about Schizofrenia, Autism or something else in the pathology domain.
I don't really like the fact that I have to present myself in this formal way, but what we don't do for the university! If someone is interested you know where to find me, in the university of course...aaa, if someone know something about electricity problems not in the brain but in a very old van please let me know!!!

Ger's bio

2009-10-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

My passion for writing first brought me to the School for Journalism in Utrecht, the Netherlands. After having established myself as a journalist, I encountered many interesting people, but after a horrible night with the family Tokkie, in-depth interviews with writers about their vaginal dryness and making a fool of myself in front of the Idols-jury, I decided it was time for a career change. During my Journalism studies I had taken a course in psychology which immediately triggered my interest. For this reason I started studying Psychology at the UvA on a part-time basis, five years ago.

I enjoyed it right away and developed an interest in the neurological background of psychology. Therefore, I choose for a specialization in Psychonomics. Popular science books of Antonio Damasio, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett pushed me even further towards the ‘biology’ behind psychology and sparked an interest in philosophy. In 2008 I travelled to Australia as an exchange student and I followed courses in Philosophy (and Psychobiology, and Psychology in Law) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

After finishing Psychonomics (thesis: The Role of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Human Learning Paradigms), I applied for the research master Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Here, I study in the Cognitive Neuroscience track. I combine my studies with working for several magazines, like MindOpen (see for an English and Dutch version www.mindopen.nl), Green2, Vrij Nederland, Millionaire, Summertime and JFK.

Bio Mieke Schulte

2009-10-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

Hey!

My name is Mieke, I am 23 and from Haarlem. My background is in Psychobiology. I completed the bachelor here at the UvA. Currently I am in the Cognitive Neuroscience track of the master, for which I’m glad because it really interests me how the brain influences behavior.
I didn’t write a research proposal, but I did an internship at Psychonomy instead. The experiment was about retrieval-induced forgetting, in which we tested the effect on priming on the remembering of practiced and nonpracticed word-pairs (this explanation probably doesn’t do the research any right, but I found the theory really complicated). Although this research wasn’t really in my field interest, and I spend a lot of hours in a room by myself, it made clear to me that research is something I want to do.
I don’t have one particular field that interests me, because there are so many interesting fields. However, I do know some things. I would like to do something involving the brain and its influence on behavior. I don’t like theoretical models, so I don’t think I’m going to end there.
So, I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up, but I always choose a next step that interests me, because I believe that “You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no result” (Mahatma Ghandi). I don’t exactly know where I want to end, but if I choose what interests me I will end somewhere that will interest me.

I didn’t have a lot inspiration when writing this bio, so if there’s anything you would like to know feel free to ask.

See you!

Vanessa's Bio (tutor)

2009-10-06T10:44:00.000-07:00

I was born in Boston and grew up in Atlanta in the USA. I was always obsessed with the natural world and decided to go to the University of Georgia to study genetics and evolutionary biology. But through a fantastical chain of epiphanies, I came out with a double degree in Anthropology and Linguistics and a minor in Arabic. Then I moved to Marrakech for 2 years (just to check if I could actually speak Arabic) and then I came to Amsterdam to get my MSc in Cognitive Science!

My master thesis was about a cleverly-constrained random number generator that I tricked into informing me about the dynamics of cultural evolution systems. Ok, somewhat more seriously, I'm interested in discovering laws in the dynamics of cultural transmission systems. Specifically, I look at how information gains structure when it is iterated through a population of agents and whether individual cognitive biases (like learning biases, production biases, etc.) and different properties of the social network (like population size, how much information one transmits, etc.) can predict this structure. Most of my results are disenheartingly abstract, but one experiment I ran with humans on mathematical function learning showed that a group of people is generally as smart as its stupidest member. That was fun. I did my thesis work under the supervision of Jelle Zuidema at the Institute for Language, Logic, and Computation (ILLC). You can read all about it here and here.

I'm currently employed by the UvA as a part-time researcher at the ILLC with Rens Bod and Jelle Zuidema and as assistant to different courses in the MBCS and master Psychology. Hopefully, I'll begin a PhD next year with Simon Kirby at the University of Edinburgh in the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unti (LEC) where I will continue to research the dynamics of cultural evolution systems. Additionally, I volunteer 2 days a week in the research department of Fairfood International, analyzing the sustainability of the wheat and sugar beet sector. So if you've got a burning question about wheat or sugar beets, don't be shy.

In my free time, I enjoy playing the banjo around town, making musical instruments, and drawing really detailed pictures of birds. I also used to have a weird pirate radio program called Radio Cognito, which we might be starting up again this year. If you're interested in participating, please contact me or your Cognito student association.

Katharina's Bio

2009-10-06T09:50:00.000-07:00

As my real name is quite long, someone abbreviated it to "Katha" a long time ago. Since I might not react to it any more, I always introduce myself as "Katha". When I did my A-levels in Meppen (North Germany) in 2006, I could not decide whether I wanted to do natural sciences or humanities as I somehow liked all subjects in school besides sports and English. Luckily, I had a friend telling me about the awesome study programme "Cognitive Science" in Osnabrueck, which offered an interdisciplinary approach to the brain by integrating mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, neuroinformatics, neuroscience, computational linguistics, philosophy and cognitive psychology. Though, I was initially interested in psychology and neuroscience, I liked the computer science part most, probably because I learned a lot there. In my second year, I somehow drifted to the field of linguistics after I became teaching assistant in the introductory linguistics class in my third semester. I got stuck in this field such that I even ended up writing a Bachelor's thesis about "Focus marking by speech-accompanying gestures". However, after my semester abroad in Edinburgh in 2008, I realized that linguistics is not what I want to do in the future. Mainly because I wanted to gain a broader understanding of how the brain works and not just how language is processed in the brain. I started to consider philosophy a lot at that time and applied for the cognitive science track in Amsterdam (I wanted to go to the Netherlands and did not really look for programmes outside this great country). After having attended some philosophical conferences, I became desillusionated about what philosophy can teach us about the brain. I read through the content of the obligatory courses in the cognitive science track, did not like what I read (philosophy and linguistics) and wrote a long e-mail to Silke that I would prefer to do the cognitive neuroscience track. Now, I am in the cognitive neuroscience track, thinking about doing more theoretical or computational stuff, which in my eyes is no contradiction to the track as modelling studies are definitely part of cognitive neuroscience. I am especially interested in memory, consciousness and how the brain processes information in general. I can imagine to go into a more mathematical direction for my Master's project and to end up in a Phd in theoretical neuroscience.
As some of you were interested in my "artistic career", you can have a look at what I did here.

Bio Silva van Schagen

2009-10-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

Hello Everybody,

My name is Silva van Schagen. I am 27 years old and live in Haarlem (which is about a quarter by train from Amsterdam). At the moment I am a first year student in the interdisciplinary master brain and Cognitive Sciences; track Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

From 2006 until 2009 I participated in the bachelor Psychobiology at the UvA. In short this bachelor tries to combine behaviour and biology and looks for a way of integration of these themes.

My bachelor thesis consisted of writing a research proposal. Prof. dr. J.G.W. Raaijmakers, who is associated with the faculty of social and behavioural sciences at the UvA, was my mentor for writing the proposal. The main question of my research proposal was; if subliminal priming can lead to long term effects. In which I especially focused on long term priming of words. There still exists much controversy about this subject and most experiments performed in this area failed to find significant results concerning long term effects of subliminal priming, although short term effects have well been established. To understand more about this so called unconscious processing it will be useful to know more about subliminal priming.

In contradiction of what the topic of my research proposal suggests, my main interests now are more focused on the neuroscientific field. By this I mean more focus on brain functions and the relationship between specific brain areas and certain behaviours. After finishing my master I would like to participate in fundamental research on neurocognitive disorders like PTSD, depression, addiction, schizophrenia and other mental disorders. Also I would like to be involved in broader interdisciplinary studies that maybe can give more insight in the "bigger picture" when it comes to neurocognition.

Nina's Bio

2009-10-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,

my name is Nina, I am originally from Düsseldorf/Germany and I am currently enrolled in the Cognitive Sciences track. As for my background, it is quite different from this master program. I did my BA in computer science at the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf. Besides computer science I have always been interested in psychology and biology which, when choosing a bachelor program, did not seem to be easy to combine. Since I had to choose a minor field of study for my bachelor program, I went for biology and specialized in Bioinformatics.

My bachelor thesis „Benchmarking of Methods for the Identification of Orthologs“ was embedded in a dissertation about a newly developed algorithm for the comparison and clustering of prokaryotic gene and protein data. In my thesis I compared several algorithms (using a predefined gold standard method) by aligning and comparing the gene and protein data of different Escherichia coli strains and that way learn about the evolution of E. coli.

During my bachelor program I worked as a research assistant for a psychology professor. We did several studies in the field of psycho-acoustics as (e.g.) the influence of noise distraction on working behavior and concentration in order to find out what sound or noise parameters yielded in this distraction. I was able to help develop and conduct some very interesting experiments and analyze the resulting data.

Besides the neurobiology class in my bachelor program, it was especially this job that fueled the idea of going for a different master program and to learn more about the brain and/or mind. Since I am quite new in this field, I do not have any definite future plans yet. I am looking forward to get a better insight into different research fields during the internships where I will hopefully also gain some insight in the (cognitive) neuroscience field. So, I am looking forward to the next weeks and months...

Best, Nina

Bio Martine Groefsema

2009-10-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Martine Groefsema. My background is a bachelor in psychobiology. I am interested in how the brain works since my final project on high school, were I investigated the role of the brain in maintaining an addiction. Is an addiction really something ‘between the eyes’? For my bachelor thesis I went to the NIN to do a research on attention. We investigated if top-down attention can inlfuence the visual processing at a monocular level. I am in the cognitive neuroscience track because I am interrest in the interplay between biological processes and the cognitive functions we execute as humans. But if I have to choose between neuroscience and psychology, it would probably be neuroscience.
I have not defined my specific interrests yet. I am still curious at much different topics, for instance sleep, I really do not understand how it is possible that people are able to talk to me when I am sleeping. Visual processing, it is just too strange how you brain can play around with your (in)ability to process visual illusions. Psychopathology, for instance I work with a kid with autism. Why does he react different to the same stimuli as a ‘normal’ kid, what happens in his head? Emotions, you think you can activly control them, but much is done for you. Memory, do you really know stuff from the time you were a child or do you think because it is told you so many times? These were just a couple of interrests and as you can see they are from a lot of different topics, hopefully I can state my interrests more precise after doing another internship or progressing in this master.

Bio Merel Rijnsburger

2009-10-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

Hi, my name is Merel. I live in Amsterdam now, but I used to live with my parents in Aphen a/d Rijn, near Leiden. I did my bachelor psychobiology on the university of Amsterdam because the relation between behavior and brain interests me a lot. For my bachelorthesis, I did an intership at the clinical psychology department. It was about fear conditioning and the influence of a beta-blocker (propranolol) on it. Propranolol seems to erase the fear experience of a certain memory. I learned a lot during this internship and I think this kind of research is very interesting, but focussing on neuronal mechanisms is more in my league. I'm in the cognitive neuroscience track now. I choosed this master because the interdisciplinary character is very nice. My interests are neuropathology (e.g., depression, alzheimer etc), aging and neuroimaging (I think it's interesting, but pretty difficult though). Many more topics are interesting me though. I like to filosofy sometimes, for instance about consciousness, but I think the focuss on neurobiological processes fits more with my interests.

Andreea's Bio

2009-10-06T07:09:00.000-07:00

Hi I'm Andreea. I was born in Bucharest, Romania and I moved to the US when I was almost 4 years old. Since I grew up bilingual and splitting my time between two different cultures, language always somehow sparked my interest, but I’ve always been a little confused. I entered the University of California, San Diego as a writing major. I switched it to French Literature soon after, thinking that I could keep up my French that way and still do some writing without having to do formal writing classes. Luckily, during my first year, I took a few lower-division general linguistics courses intended for non-linguists that turned me on the to field of the study of language. US universities are pretty flexible, so I was also able to add a Linguistics major. I became especially interested in first and second language acquisition, multilingualism, and language loss and impairment while taking a Psycholinguistics course during my year abroad in Lyon, France. Upon returning home for my 3^rd year, I decided to work as a research assistant in the UCSD Cognitive Development lab with Dr. Gedeon Deak on a project studying cognitive flexibility in anaphor resolution in 3 - 5 year-old children. Having had no background in cognitive science, I found the non-linguistic aspects quite foreign. Working on this project made me realize that I needed to have an understanding of cognition in order to understand language acquisition. After graduating, I decided to take some time off from school, and I was lucky enough to find a job in Belgium at a company called Nuance, which works in the field of speech synthesis and recognition, where I worked on developing a text-to-speech system (those funny voices that talk to you on your GPS) for Romanian. Working there was a great learning experience and it was fulfilling to put my linguistic knowledge to use in the real world. But it also made me realize that I really wanted to focus on human (as apposed to machine) language acquisition and use. Now, I am really loving being back in a learning environment again and have already learned so much that I didn’t know in the past weeks in the Cognitive Science masters program. Although I am just starting to browse for a first research project now, I plan to do my research somewhere within the ACLC, which seems to have an abundance of opportunities pertaining to my interests, including projects on multilingualism and specific language impairment, early bilingual acquisition, and cognitive approaches to second language acquisition. During the next block, I will be taking “Hot Topics in Linguistics and Cognition” and “Advanced Topics in Language and Memory”, and I plan to take “Psychoneurolinguistics” next year. After the masters I would like to eventually pursue a PhD and continue researching and possibly helping people in some way (directly working with people with language impairment or teaching languages, or indirectly through research on different aspects of language acquisition and loss).

2009-10-06T07:02:00.001-07:00

Hello. Im Diana, Im in the Cognitive Science track. I did my BA in Philosophy at the University of Bucharest. I've focused mainly on Analytical Philosophy, did as many Philosophy of Mind and Logic courses as I could, which led me to writing a final thesis on cognition enhancement by means of nanotechnology (for some reason that made me kind of unpopular).
I spent my last year in Cracow, Poland where I translated a manual about the Lvov-Warsaw logicians. It seems that the school was pretty much the top of its domain until second World War. After that, the Dutch people took over...This is pretty much the reason why Im here. That and the fact that I am interested in the brain.
I have this hunch that most of the problems in philosophy could be answered by looking deeper into our heads and not into some abstract formal models or theories. From all the philosophers, I felt closest to Nietzsche (he thinks that "there is more wisdom in your body than in the deepest Philosophy) and Quine (who believes that philosophy had to become an "empirical science").
I tried to prove in my thesis that there is no valid philosophical argument against the idea that neuroscience and cognitive science could give us a complete explanation of the way we think. It is sufficient to just assume strong evolutionism and consistency of arguments and then you see that there are no real critiques to this.
Now I want to see if it is possible to bridge the gap between cognitive and neuroscience. For that I think it is sufficient to explain a neuroscientific theory with a formal system commonly used in cognitive science. Something that people tried to do before was explaining neural networks through non-monotonic logic, so this will be pretty much my direction for the first semester project. If anyone else is interested in this, I would love to talk about it since I am still looking for partners for the first project. I already found some people who might supervise this in two Institutes, all I need now is someone willing to participate.

Corinna's Bio

2009-10-06T06:25:00.000-07:00

You already had the chance to read about the Cognitive Science studies in Osnabrueck, so I did the same bachelor there. Originally, I am from Potsdam, famous town next to the less famous Berlin ;]. I did my Bachelor thesis about cross-cultural facial emotion recognition, i.e. I had German as well as Japanese subjects (I did my semester abroad in Yokohama) look at lots of faces that showed emotions and wanted to know, if they there are differences in how these faces were assessed. I used eye tracking for that (and yes, there really seem to be differences ;]).

As for my real research interests, I always wanted to do sleep research and am yet not quite specialised in any subarea of that field, but at the moment I love to explore the theory of Giulio Tononi, who recently proposed a very smart new theory about how sleep might work. Hope, he's going to win the nobel prize soon :]! He also investigates in the question what consciousness is, generally spoken, but not in an philosophical manner, but in form of clever kind of informatic/math genious calculations ;) that establish some sort of default network in the brain that has to be at least activated to generate consciousness. Well, this is my second main interest, and I'd like to combine sleep and consciousness, especially because I think that there are so many things still undiscovered. People are always talking about memory consolidation and dreams are e.g. still a stepchild. But dreams might be a nice path to new insights in consciousness as well. However, first I have to win the nobel prize and with that reputation I might dare to work on that as well ;].

I am very happy, that my studies here in Amsterdam support these ambitions, because I'm learning all the relevant techniques I'll need. I'm going to do my internship at the Sleep & Cognition Department at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.

Hey, and well, since I also do have a life besides of that: I love to sing and dance, do Aikido, drink cocktails, dabble in water, and everything about Japan. If you wanna found a band, choir or anything similar, I'd participate ;].

PS: I was advised to make advertisement wherever possible: I'm still looking for something to live close to uni. Amstelveen sucks ;P. So if you know someone that knows somebody who heard that...

Kim's Bio

2009-10-06T05:23:00.000-07:00

Kim's Bio
Hi there!I`m Kim, just turned 22, and I`m currently in the Cognitive Science track.

In 2005 I started my bachelor in the English Language and Culture at theUniversity of Amsterdam, because I wanted to become a teacher. I loved reading the literature, especially Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Lolita, poems by differentauthors from the Romantic period and more. However, I was really intrigued by the linguistics courses. After taking the course Language and speech development I was convinced that I was a linguist. Therefore I did a minor in Linguistics/Psycholinguistics, and I wrote my Bachelor thesis on Second language learning and working memory.

After my Bachelor I decided to start the Master General Linguistics at the UvA. I was interested in language development in children, second language acquisition, acquired language disorders and developmental language disorders. I developed a strong interest in the mental lexicon and that's why I wrote my master thesis on the mental lexicon. My master thesis was called: Second language lexical processing in less proficient and proficient bilinguals: An evaluation of three bilingual mental lexicon models.

In addition to the General Linguistics master I took two extra courses that were part of the Research master Brain and Cognitive Sciences: Hot topics in Linguistics and Psychoneurolinguistics. I loved these two courses, and that's why I decided to start this master.

I am looking forward to learn more about the brain, "how it works" and how language is "fitted" into it, since I am very interested in the relation between language and the brain. The courses I will follow next are: Brain development, plasticity and repair and Advanced topics in language and memory.

I am still not sure what I want to do after this master. I wanted to become a teacher, so hopefully I will be able to do research and teach at the same time. However, it would also be nice to do research on aphasia to get more insight into it, and work at a rehabilitation centre for aphasics.

Roels very short autobiography

2009-10-06T02:51:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

It is nice to see that I interest you enough to read this bio.

I’m Roel de Haan from the track of neuroscience. I filled the previous three years with the bachelor bio-medical sciences, studying many aspects of many illnesses and treatments. During the bachelor I got more and more convinced that I had chosen the wrong path, because I didn’t care much for genetically modified yeasts and probiotics and synthesis-pathways of any (co-) enzyme.

So when I finished my bachelor thesis (on an in-host survival mechanism of a sometimes harmful yeast) I decided it was time for a change and the field of neuroscience looked promising. My main interest in the brain (and cognitive) sciences is cellular integration of complex input and how many levels of integration can give rise to something that we perceive as coherent thought, although I think our generation is not going to see this quest finished.

My first internship on a lab on Science Park will deal with a very small part of the big question; the search for the localization of synapses of a between two types of hippocampal neurons, measured in slices of a rat brain. My future plans are to graduate from this master, become a PhD, become professor, win the nobel prize and to become part of the shortlist of famous scientists ;)

Charles Darwin Albert Einstein Roel de Haan

Anna's Bio

2009-10-06T02:02:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, my name is Anna Bennis and I am in the track Cognitive Neuroscience. I did the bachelorprogramme psychobiology at the UvA. I wanted to do this bachelorprogramme because of a big interest in people and their behavior, why we act in certain ways and what the biological cause of a particular behavior is.

My bachelor thesis, which was a research proposal, was called “An investigation of the role of the endocannabinoid receptor CB1 in depression” under the supervision of Marian Joels. Obviously it is about depression which in this case was a ratstudy. In this study I would have wanted to look at the CB1 receptor in the hypothalamus and see if activation of the CB1 receptor facilitates or inhibits depression.

I do not yet have an internship but there are some very interesting studies going on at the NIN under the supervision of Dick Swaab. They are doing studies on neuropsychiatric disorders. For some unknown reason neuropsychiatric disorder fascinate me and I would like to be doing research on that subject. Which is quite a broad subject, not only in the amount of disorders but also in the approaches that can be used to study this. So I am still kind of lost and I do not know, yet, what it is exactly that I want to do, although I do know that this master programme is what I want to do and during this master programme I hope to find out what it is I want to be doing in the future. Luckily we have two internships, which I am really excited about, because so far my education has been pretty much theoretical. So I am looking forward to actually participating in a study instead of reading about it.

Paula's Bio

2009-10-06T01:59:00.000-07:00

So, I’m Paula and I’m in the Cognitive Science Track. Originally, I come from Bautzen which is a small town in Eastern Germany lying within the border triangle with Czech and Poland. I’ve always been interested in human thinking and I didn’t want to decide for just one aspect, so I spared me the hassle of choosing between humanities and natural science and did my Bachelor’s degree in the Cognitive Science programme in Osnabrück. As this has been the only Bachelor’s programme in Germany when I started in 2006, I moved to Osnabrück. It consists of eight different fields: Mathematics, Computer Science, AI, Neuroinformatics, Computational Linguistics, Philosophy of Cognition, Cognitive Psychology and Neurobiology. After three semesters of foundations I went more into the matters of Neurobiopsychology which now also forms my main area of interest. I’ve worked as a research assistant in that subsection of the institute, basically conducting EEG and eye-tracking studies (which was a great job).
Additionally and as the basis for my Bachelor’s thesis, I did an internship in the Cognitive Psychophysiology Lab of Jeff Miller at the University of Otago in New Zealand (I can also recommend that to everyone, not just because of the country ;P). My thesis dealt with people’s ability of judging the time of their own mental events such as decisions. It raises a methodological problem for Libet and his reviewers. You might read the link or here in short: Libet et al. compared ERP onset times with subjectively estimated times and drew the conclusion - as brain activity preceded conscious awareness – that we don’t have conscious will. This became a huge debate, loosely referred to as “free will debate”, but it only follows from the assumption that people can estimate their own decision times reasonably well. I found out: they don’t.
This topic leads me to ONE of thousands of exciting research areas, that is, decision-making. I fancy this area, but I am highly motivated to do anything else and I don’t want to restrict myself so early. So, I am open and – again – easily motivated for research (actual work as it teaches me most) in human (!) cognition WITH the brain.

Bio of Neeltje Peters (tutor)

2009-10-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

Yes, also the tutors will briefly introduce themselves on this weblog!
I'm Neeltje Peters - van Gemert, almost 29, and I have a background in neurobiology. Originally from a small village in the south of the Netherlands, I came to the University of Amsterdam 11 years ago to study biology. After my first year, I decided I could look at plants and trees in my own time, so for my studies I chose the direction of medical biology. Doing this, I got more and more interested in the brain, and did a minor (1 year) in psychology next to my 4-year major in biology.
My first internship was at the UvA as well, looking at the effects of stress and maternal deprivation in rats. I enjoyed this internship so much, that I returned to the lab of Marian Joëls after my graduation to do my PhD research on the effects of stress on the hippocampus. The main result (see summary) of my thesis is that the effects of stress and corticosterone can differ both in different subareas of the hippocampus as well as on different levels (gene expression, protein expression and ion current). This should be taken as an advice not to draw firm conclusions based on findings on only one level! You never know what additional effects or compensatory mechanisms might exist...
Towards the end of my PhD period, I came to the conclusion that I didn't want to be a scientist when I grew up... So after graduation, I first had a temporary job at ZonMw, where I was involved in watching over various grants for medical biological research. I now work at the CSCA as an assistant coordinator, which means that I do a lot of things including organising the Summer School and Lecture Series you all will attend. And, of course, I am a tutor for Current Issues as well.

Bio, Lau Møller Andersen

2009-10-06T00:43:00.001-07:00

Hi, I am Lau Møller Andersen, or just Lau

I am on the Cognitive Science track.

I started studying philosophy in Århus, Denmark, in 2005.

In 2007-2008 I studied philosophy in Sheffield, England. This was an ERASMUS-trip.

I then returned to Århus to finish my bachelor off with a supplementary course in linguistics.

While studying philosophy I have concentrated on the philosophy of mind, my 2nd year thesis was on this subject. In Denmark the philosophy education is very general, but in England I had the chance to do more specific courses. Relevant for my present studies are the courses, philosophy of biology and philosophy of psychology.

My bachelor thesis was about showing that Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument has no real bearing on the acquisition of language. I used Michael Tomasello's theory of language acquisition as a basis. I argued that the poverty of the stimulus argument relies on a misconception of how language is acquired, which I won't spell out here, because I'm afraid that would bore you.

My favourite researcher is Michael Tomasello. He researches into language acquisition, and he really backs up his claims by experimental evidence, whereas the language acquisition field has been characterised by more speculative approaches the last thirty years.

I'm very interested in the relation between language and the brain. Also interested in memory and in general about the functioning of the brain.

At the moment I am unsure in which direction my research is going towards, but I hope to get some ideas during the meetings in October.

In the next block I will do Neuroimaging 1 and Brain Development, Plasticity, and Repair.

Elisa's Bio

2009-10-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

Helleu! My name is Elisa and I’m in the Cognitive Neuroscience track. Before this Master I did the bachelor Psychobiology at the UvA. My bachelor thesis was called: Role of environmental factors in adult life on maternally induced epigenetic changes of glucocorticoid receptor functions. This is a research proposal for a rat study. In rats is has been shown that the maternal care has a big influence on the development of the rat-pups stress system. Bad maternal care in early life alters the gene expresses ion of some genes in the pups. My proposal was about changes in the environment in the adult life of the rat pup to reverse those gene expression changes . In this way, we might be able to ‘cure’ these neglected pups. My supervisor was Melly Oitzl. She works at both the UvA but most at the University of Leiden. Because I really liked her as my supervisor I’m also going do my first Master internship at her lab in Leiden. This also will be a rat study to see how rats with a genetic predisposition of schizophrenia will develop this disease in reaction to certain (stressful) life events, in early life, puberty and adult life.This research will be an interesting way to combine my two main interests in the Cognitive Neuroscience; development of the brain in early life and pathologies. I guess so far I’ve been orientating myself the most in the animal research direction but I would also like to research both of my interests in humans; ideally by doing research in babies or small children. To get to know this topic a little better I will do the course Developmental Psychopathology this semester.Also I really liked the lectures I had so far about the neuroscience behind sex. The student association of my bachelor, Congo, is organizing a congress with this topic for December the 9 th so that should be fun!

2009-10-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,
My name is Iske, I'm in the Cognitive Science track. When convenient (i.e. as an excuse for not understanding all that difficult neuroscience), I say I'm a linguist. I have a bachelor's degree in Linguistics and am also doing a research master in that field. Actually, I'm taking a class on Generative Grammar right now! However, my fellow linguists think I'm different too, because I believe language only exists in individual brains, and linguistics is fundamentally a cognitive science. This inability to fit in is obviously what made me such a PSYCHO linguist.
Recently however, I found a place full of people like me: the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. My ambition is to do a PhD there, and as a preparation for that I hope to find a second research project there as well. It will most likely have something to do with syntactic processing: the building of sentences in the brain and the representation of syntactic knowledge. I hope to learn about EEG and look at the time-course of linguistic processes with the use of ERPs.
Another topic I'm interested in is the relation between language and thought. I think there is a lot of interesting research being done in the tradition of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (often associated with Sapir and Whorf). This idea has recently been sort of 'redefined' and is now studied in a much more sophisticated way than before by people like Stephen Levinson, John Lucy and Lera Boroditsky.
At the moment I'm doing my first internship, which is about linguistic representations of agreement morphology and definiteness in bilingual children and children with specific language impairment. I use a perception task (self paced listening) to investigate possible causes of these kids' deficits in language production. I'm completing the piloting stage now and hope to start testing actual, live children in a couple of weeks... A bit scary, but exciting!
I also like to organise science-related (or: geeky) fun, mostly as a board member of Cognito. On the agenda are the lecture series Café Cognitive (first edition october 15!), the Halloween party and Cinema Cognitive (a brain and cognitive science movie night). Outside of Cognito, I'm currently planning a full-day EEG workshop in the second semester.
Now, to the next speaker!
Best,
Iske

Astrid's Bio

2009-10-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Paul's bio

2009-10-05T07:15:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody, my name is Paul Mertens and I’m from a village in the south of NL. I had some great high-school teachers there who got me interested in exact science, philosophy and language. I studied psychobiology at the UvA because I wanted to understand the mind, describe consciousness and find the free will. At the end of my bachelor the faculty was moving to the new building, and because of that there were little internships available for me. So I joined the evolutionary biologists and did my bachelor thesis on dispersal patterns in the spider mite Tetranychus urticae, which was different.
However, my main interest remains the organization of cognitive functions and information. In a broad sense I am interested in the apparent division of our conscious and subconscious and more specifically I am interested in the functioning of neural networks. I hope to be able to work on neural network modeling during my masters.
Something that might need some work if I want to succeed in this masters is that my interest in the mind has always been directed more towards philosophy than towards science. Still, I find philosophers without the proper scientific knowledge to be a complete waste of everyone’s time. My favorite philosophers are Plato (for his very lucid writings on ethics and governance) and Baudrillard (for his bewildering social philosophy of the postmodern society). Another writer who made an impact on me was Aldous Huxley with his work on social governance, art and the mind.
I do not really have a favorite (neuro)scientist, however if I have to name one I would say Raymond Kurzweil because of his incredible versatility, optimism and his focus on technological and societal progress.

Susanne and her bio

2009-10-05T06:58:00.000-07:00

Well, then I am the next.

My name is Susanne Löhne and currently I am enrolled in the Master's programme "Brain and Cognitive Sciences" in the track "Cognitive Sciences". I am 23 years old and from Germany (from a nice, but small town named Freyburg). Before this Master's I studied Cognitive Sciences in Osnabrück. There I concentrated on philosophy, linguistics and neuroinformatics, but besides that I also had foundational classes in maths and computer sciences, neurobiology and cognitive psychology, logics and statistics, and of course in AI. I have to enumerate this that way, because I always have a problem to build up an hierarchy for all the fields that form cognitive sciences and -which might be more interesting here- I have a problem to formulate a hierarchy of interests in those fields for myself. I feel that the most interesting thing to do for me in this fields is to combine all of them.
That's why I also choose this track: I am quite interested in combining different results of different research fields. Of course the research fields should be connected to human cognition, although I am not sure anymore after all this studying, if this means exclusivley to just study the brain. For me cognition doesn't stop beyond the brain and it is not limited to brain processes. "The brain has a body" (Chiel & Beer, 1997, can be accessed via UvA) and is embedded in an environment and social context. As you might guess my faviourite research paradigm is thus that of embedded, embodied cognition and the scientists associated with this paradigm are quite cool for me. It is a broad field with ample scope for research, that I could do.
Other things I am really interested in are cybernetics (for example by Heinz von Foerster) and ethics (for instance by Aristotle, Kant and Fromm). I have the feeling that this fits well with my wish to combine fields, because all of those interests assume something like an onlooker perspective.
Personally I like to learn languages and to analyse them, but this passion is just a hobby and couldn't move me to study pure linguistics and philology.
As for my future I am open to what comes. I am sure the internships, which I want to use to try out different kinds of research methods, will ground what I am going to do after this two years.

And now for something completely different...

The Kick-off: Ruben's Bio

2009-10-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

Well... guess I'm kicking off what's going to be a long list of short bio's.

Having swirled around not knowing what to do for a year, I decided to start the Bèta-Gamma (Natural and Social Sciences) bachelor in 2005. In the 2nd year I switched from a specialization in Artificial Intelligence to Psychonomics. I figured they are actually fairly similar, since A.I. tries to construct the brain and Psychonomics tries to dissect it.
For my Bèta-Gamma research project me and two fellow students investigated the possibilities of The vOICe and the lack of knowledge about Synesthesia and underlying neural processes when using this system. Next to this, we tried to integrate face-recognition with The vOICe using Matlab.

I did my Psychonomics bachelor thesis "A comparison of two long-term memory models: New insights from semantic dementia studies" under the supervision of Prof. Jaap Murre, who was also the supervisor of my Bèta-Gamma research project. Patients with semantic dementia are characterized by a specific loss of semantic memory in both verbal and non-verbal abilities, caused by temporal lobe atrophy. This fairly unique form of dementia allowed for the investigation of long-term memory in a new way and made it possible to further sharpen models of Long-term memory and consolidation.
Although my interests are still very broad and I don't like excluding anything beforehand, the research field of memory is one that has succeded to attract me for quite some time now. This is also one of the reasons why the Cognitive Neuroscience track suits me well and why this could very likely be part of either one of the two research projects in this master.
Currently I'm enjoying writing and editing for TIS and BLIND, playing electric guitar, organizing a monthly singer-songwriter evening called Fusion Unplugged and doing some motor-cycle lesson. Next to this, I just started as an MRI assistent at the AMC.
In the coming years I expect to get first-hand experience with doing (animal) research and will most likely also study abroad. Hopefully finding a field of research that keeps me interested.

I hand the microphone to the next person.

Introduction & first assignment

2009-09-30T08:20:00.000-07:00

This weblog is a public weblog used by the course “Current Issues” of the Master Brain and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. Students of this master will express their scientific opinion related to subjects (articles, newsflashes etc.) of this course.

Your first assignment is two write a short Bio (approx. 300 words).

This bio must reflect your scientific background and interests. So you could write something about your bachelor thesis), research you've done or papers you've published. Also please state your current interests, the track you are in, your favorite scientist or research-paradigm and your future plans. Please tag your blogpost with a few keywords and make sure your name is one of them. Please do this for all assignments so we can easily find your posts. Of course you can add a picture, link to your website or other interesting stuff. Please make sure your short bio is posted before Wednesday October 7.