As a secondary school student, Lydia Moonen could not get enough of Erik Scherder, the TV programme *Mindf*ck*, and other reading and viewing material about the brain. “This deeply inspired me to become involved in research” she says. While studying Psychology and Philosophy at Radboud University, she also took several courses in the Bachelor’s track Brain and Cognition. She became fascinated by the comprehensiveness of brain research and therefore chose the research Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience (CNS). “I am drawn to its precision: you do not just look at the output, at behaviour, but also at the neural mechanisms behind it. I find it fascinating how neurons firing lead to behaviour, language, and perception.”
Skull cap
The Research Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience is 20 years old and attracts around 100 students a year from various disciplines: often psychology, but also linguistics, AI, biology, or medical sciences. They share one thing: curiosity about exactly how things work under our skull cap. Unique to Nijmegen’s Master’s is its integrated approach. During the first year, students immerse themselves in one of the four research themes of the Donders Institute: Language and Communication; Perception, Action, and Decision-making; Development and Lifelong Plasticity; and Natural Computing and Neurotechnology. Among other things, students learn how we learn, understand, and produce language (and can sometimes stumble over words), how we find our way around a building, remember faces, and how our brain continues to learn.
Students receive a lot of theory and are introduced to the institute’s research labs and techniques like EEG. During a practicum in the hospital, students literally take a look inside a brain. Moonen explains, “Then you cut open the brain of a deceased patient and see where the hippocampus is.” There, they also learned how each brain differs depending on age, life, and cause of death, among other things. “I looked at the brain of a 90-year-old woman, and it looked amazingly good, with a good, full structure.”
From next academic year, there will be minor adjustments to the general and track-specific methodology courses, but by and large, the structure of the master’s has remained the same over the past 20 years. At the start of the programme, students specialise in one of the four tracks. Moonen chose Perception, Action, and Decision-making. “I find visual perception very interesting. It is not that your brain simply processes images that fall on your eyes. When interpreting images, we take in a lot of knowledge of the environment. In the kitchen, for example, you are more likely to perceive a cup than in a garage full of objects.”
Moonen is now doing a research internship at Donders professor Marius Peelen’s Visual Cognitive Science Lab. “I will investigate whether imagination can influence visual perception. Suppose you are on a bicycle and you imagine last year’s beautiful holiday. Can you then still perceive your surroundings properly?” It is a new research topic, so Moonen and her supervisor are first working on an experimental design: how can you reliably test the hypothesis that imagination influences perception?
Elusive
Eighty percent of graduates become researchers. Moonen would like to do that too, starting with a PhD. Whether she wants to do that abroad or in Nijmegen, she does not know yet. “I like both options. You gain new experiences abroad, but Donders is a very reputable and nice place to do a PhD. Moreover, even if you do a PhD here, you can often go abroad for a year.”
The master’s focus on research is also reflected in the CNS Student Journal, in which students publish their master’s thesis. Their articles match those from official journals: Elsevier Science Publishers has already advised Donders to put the journal on an open-access platform. Moonen is one of the journal’s editors, who together select the two best articles per specialisation. “It’s very instructive, and it gives me a good impression of how to write my own master’s thesis later,” she says.
As one of the few master’s programs, CNS also has its own very active study association: Dondrite. Among other things, it organises lectures, trips, a career day, and an annual congress called Synapsium (a contraction of synapse and symposium). For the previous Synapsium, Moonen and the other committee members chose the theme ‘Elusive’: untouchable and difficult to grasp. “Because there are still many things in the brain that cannot be fully explored, such as consciousness and human cognition. This is how we emphasise that there is still a lot to discover in this field,” Moonen says.
