Waiting for my degree

I am done! Five minutes ago I mailed the final version of my masters thesis "The Neurobiology of Conscious Vision", to both professors that have to grade it. All I need to do now is wait till april 28th, talk about my USA-research project for 15 minutes and take my masters degree in Neuroscience and Cognition home! This talk will be a repetition of the talk I will give for a Neuroscience symposium at our medical centre and close to what I presented my USA lab in november last year, so that won't be a terrible lot of work. This week I well spend a couple of hours at my job at the electronics store and from monday I will be employment by the University. this means I can feed my curiosity about the functoining of the brain and visual system and get paid for it! How 'bout that?

My book order from amazon arrived last week. I haven't had the chance to look at all of them very well, but Christof Koch's 'the Quest for Conscious" is a pretty complete work. Margaret Wilson's 'Vision and art' is not as complete, but offers a nice basic desription of the visual system and the relation to artworks. How do we perceive art and why do we like it; a nice book for both artists and people with an interest in science. Another book on this topic I expect a lot of is Al Seckel's "masters of deception; Escher, Dali and the artists of optical illussions". Escher and Dali have always been two of my favorite artists, and study-wize I am very interested in optical illusions, so this should be a great book! Unfortunately it ships slowly, but hopefully it's worth the wait.


For the interested few, here's the abstract of my master thesis;

PC Klink - The Neurobiology of Conscious Vision - Abstract

The large amount of information that is present in our visually oriented world presents our brain with the need to process that information in an efficient way. This means we will not be aware of every aspect of the visual scene. The question of how the brain decides what part of information we will be conscious of and what will be kept from awareness has been avoided by the field of neuroscience because of the proposed impossibility to objectively research subjective experience. About a decade ago the topic regained interest because of a newly formulated approach, focusing on the content of conscious experience not the ‘what-is-it-like’ question. The primate visual system has been used as system to study the processes behind visual stimuli that we are aware of and those that do not reach awareness. Many studies have been performed in clinical cases of blindsight and neglect in which neural activity can be used by the brain, but does not reach awareness. Experiments on binocular rivalry and ambiguity can show neural activity to correlate with a stimulus or a percept. Findings from these experiments can help us lead the way in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness. This can be a brain area, but also a process. Here, I review the choices that have been made for a strategy to study conscious visual perception and discuss the experimental findings in the light of a theory of consciousness. The many existing theories on visual awareness seem to have more in common than one might think at first sight, and much of the disagreement seems to be based on a too strict use of own terminology, rather than fundamental differences. A fast feedforward mechanism from early visual areas to frontoparietal regions contains unconscious visual information that the brain uses to guide behavior or modulate conscious vision. A later feedback projection from higher visual areas back to earlier visual areas is essential for visual consciousness. The content of this consciousness is determined by competition between neural correlates of stimulus features, that is biased by bottom-up mechanisms determining feature strength and top-down mechanisms of expectation, emotion and attention. Looking back, it seems that neuroscience has chosen the right approach towards a neurobiological theory of (visual) consciousness. There is still a long way to go, but the recent progressions are promising.

Hoorah for random audio!

So I just re-discovered a true gem of music while my computer was playing my audiocollectio at random. I always thought the Joe Strummer version of Redemption song on the album "Streetcore" was the only version that could compete with Bob Marley's original, but turns out I had a version with Joe Strummer ... and Johnny Cash. Kinda makes me wonder how many artists have recorded the song... Let's see if I can find any more.

"You think you know who you are. You have no idea..." [Crash]

Another two weeks have past already. Let me fill you in on my whereabouts of the last two weekends and the small amount of during-the-week-activities, that are worth mentioning. I mostly spend my days reading about visual perception, consciousness and awareness, to suck up all the information I need to write my thesis. Besides this thesis I am finishing the book "the history of thinking" and I attend my philosophy class twice a week. The evenings are mostly filled with work, after all the rent has to be paid and this new Dutch health insurance system means I have to pay more in assurance as well.

Friday (13) I visited the Central Museum in my home-city Utrecht. I did not particularly like the fashion exhibition they had, but I pretty much enjoyed the Rietveld and Bloemaert exhibitions.


The saturday night after this museum visit I visited another piece of the museum's collection. The estate "old Amelisweerd" in the forests just outside of Utrecht, was build in the 18th century and is now a monument, managed by the museum. Sita used to be roommates with a couple; the girl worked for the museum and they were offered to live at the estate for a couple of years. The guy is a photographer that spends half the year in eastern europe photographing typical russian, hongarian etc scenes. These two facts lead to a russian-new-year-party at the estate, which in turn resulted in flat tires for both Sita and me (remember in the middel of the forest). We almost made it home on slowly deflating tires.

This weekend we went to the "cultural cinema" to see Crash. I can recommend this movie to anyone that doesn't necessarily need a lot of special effects and violence. The movie tells a whole bunch of apparent parallel stories of individual people in L.A. In the end all their stories collide. The movie deals with prejudice, racism and miscommunication in a very confronting fashion. Great movie! These are the first lines:

"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

Now that I am telling you what the watch, I might as well advise you all to check out the new System of a Down; Hypnotize. It's weird, it's fast, it's good!

Lagwagon

After seeing a whole bunch of people from Papendrecht on friday night at Steven's party (next door!) I had the saturday off from work. Saturday night I went to Amsterdam to see Lagwagon perform in my favourite Dutch club "Melkweg" (milky way). Hooray for dutch trains; upon arrival at the train station I got notified they were working on the trail between Utrecht and Amsterdam and there would be less trains... Fortunately, I didn't have to wait too long and arrived in Amsterdam reasonably on time. I always like walking through Amsterdam at night, you are guaranteed to run in to some wierdos and I just like the atmosphere. So I walked to the Leidseplein where the Melkweg is. Turned out I was right in time to miss the first support act. The second was pretty cool though. They were called "A Wilhelm Scream" and it was a nice bunch of original hardcore. I am curious how they will sound on record, but live, they were okay.

My brother who was there as well, told me he had read in an interview that Lagwagon intended to play mostly songs of their newest record and ease down on their classics. I am happy to say this was far from the truth. They played a kick ass set with some new songs but almost all classics were played as well. The only song I missed was "Alien8", an old song but one of my favorites and a classic in lagwagon live sets. Alltogether it was a great show.

Lagwagon - Falling Apart
Lagwagon - Mr Coffee

As I walked back to the station the percentage of weirdos and drunks in the streets of Amsterdam had only increased which made it an interesting walk again. Arriving at the station I realized i should have walked a bit faster, 'cause I just missed the last regular train and the first night train (in the altered schedule; are they really working the rails at 1 am?) wasn't due for a good 40 minutes. Too short to go back in town, too long to not freeze your ass off at the station...

Luckily I had foreseen this scenario somewhat and had my bike at the train station in Utrecht, so I was able to get home (the last bus home departs at 1 am), just in time for a couple hours of sleep before I had to get up again and work on sunday. After work I met with Sita for dinner. I had forgotten that the supermarkets are closed on sunday and you have to buy your food earlier. Sita just returned from a week of snowboarding in France and didn't have any food either. So I paid "new china" a visit on my way home. I just don't get why chinese people are so small if those 2-person take-outs are enough to feed approx. 5 people. Weird!

Anyways, it's monday now, back to work!