Started working on my thesis

I have started working on the last hurdle towards my masters degree in Neuroscience; my masters thesis. Although I still have to hand in the official proposal for it, I am confident it will be approved. After all, I have the supervision and approval of two professors of our own university and I don't easily see the exam committee going against that. The reason the proposal is still on my desk is that it has to be signed by one of the professors and he's in Boston till january 18th to do some fMRI scanning at the Vision Science department of Harvard University. Ah well, I decided to start anyway. Looking at my thesis set-up I think I am being overambitious as always when I start writing a report or thesis. I hate leaving out interesting and relevant information which usually leads to me trying to put too much into a single thesis. Halfway the writing process I suddenly realize that if I will go on like this I will end up writing a book, so I end up leaving out some stuff and save the book for later (when I am all grown up and stuff). Grrr, damn you science with your questions-creating answers!

For those interested in what I intend to write the thesis about, this is a short section from the proposal that kind of covers it:

The Neuroscience of Conscious Visual Perception

Our perception of the world that surrounds us highly depends on our visual information about this world. The information we gather throughout life will in turn influence how we perceive new visual stimuli. We are not aware of everything we see, but even stimuli we are not aware of can have an effect on our perception and influence our behaviour. Some visual stimuli are ambiguous. They can elicit two different percepts with the exact same physical characteristics. Examples of such stimuli are the Necker cube and the well-known young/old woman picture. We can consciously switch between the two percepts, indicating a role for willpower in visual perception. This master thesis will review what is known about the neuroscience of conscious visual perception in a bidirectional fashion; how does a visual stimulus reach consciousness and how can consciousness influence a percept?

The different chapters will roughly address;

• See what you see: A short introduction to the visual system and its basic neural circuitry will be given. How does a visual stimulus hit the retina and what happens after that? How are different aspects of a visual stimulus such as form, motion, color, etc perceived?

• Know what you see: How do images on the retina become a percept? When and how does a stimulus reach consciousness and how is this consciousness characterized? What happens with visual stimuli that we are not aware of?

• See what you know: How does existing knowledge influence a percept. Do we observe objectively, or is every percept derived from known concepts? How do we fill in the gaps in partially occluded figures and what is the role of context in percept formation?

• See what you want: How is possible that we can consciously switch between the two percepts of an ambiguous (bi-stable) stimulus. What is the role of willpower in perception? How does this fit with what is known about percept formation and how can we investigate this issue?

• Discussion: What you see is what you get! There is more than meets the eye! The exclamation marks in these expressions will be replaced with question marks in the discussion of this thesis. I will attempt to summarize the points made in the preceding chapters and discuss the possibilities for neuroscience to investigate the processes underlying conscious visual perception and the voluntarily control of visual perception.

As I probably wrote on this blog before, this topic is a great preparation for te project I will do my PhD on. I am eager to work on this thesis but I am also confident that it will be a lot of work. Anyway, I have started, now well see when I will finish it. Starting next week I will be working at a desk at uni to minimize distractions during the writing process. I only manage to work efficiently at home under time-pressure, so the first couple of weeks I will sure be better off working elsewhere. This is also the reason I have restarted my webradio project. www.radiochrizzo.tk takes you to the shoutcast-page where you can tune in. I usually just put a lot in the playlist and leave it on shuffle. this allows me (and others) to listen to my music online.

Well, coffee's ready, I'll be off to work again. By the way, does everyone see the two percepts of the ambiguous picture at the beginning of this post (yes there are 2 percepts, you perverts!)?