Climate change is the most urgent problem currently facing humanity – including a subset who call themselves (neuro)scientists. While many academics still consider (political) activism far outside their comfort zone, the broader scientific community is slowly waking up to the urgency of the situation and the role we can play as a community of evidence-minded individuals. I believe there are few excuses for not engaging with this issue, and there are many ways to productively do so.

Since many scientists seem reluctant to speak up or unsure where to start, I’m collecting a short list of concrete things you can do (in approximate order of effort/difficulty). Pick one, get started and join the global effort necessary to tackle this problem; after all, aren’t we problem-solvers?

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Preparing images for a talk, I was using the great bioRender to grab some images of brains-in-heads in humans and mice. Putting them on my slides, I found the left-facing much more pleasant to look at. Why?

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Although we’d all like academia to be a true meritocracy, ample research shows that implicit biases create significant hurdles to achieving diversity in our communities.

Here is an overview of the data (showing both the extent to which gender biases cause problems in science, and the different factors that may be significant contributors) and possible solutions. Different iterations of slides I presented on this topic are here and here.

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For the last eight years, I called myself a cognitive neuroscientist. Throughout undergrad and grad school, I spent my days finding out how humans make decisions based on the information they extract from the outside world, and what factors play a role in determining our choices.

Half a year ago I started working with mice, asking many of the same questions. I was (and am) excited about the possibilities of recording from actual cells. I was (and am) inspired by the many genetic tools available, and the opportunities for collecting quantities of data from single individuals that are very rare in human subjects research. I also thought it would be cool to do something different – wrap my head around some fresh ideas, and perhaps build up a useful combined skill set.

“Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.”

– Benoit Mandelbrot

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I strongly believe in the value of openness and transparency, and I encourage the authors to make their data and analysis code publicly available. Over and above increasing the transparency and reproducibility of scientific findings as a whole, sharing data and code increases the visibility and impact of individual papers (McKiernan et al. 2016 eLife). Please see the standards of the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative (https://opennessinitiative.org/the-initiative/) for guidelines.

I hope this is useful to others – so far this has always worked (but my N is pretty small).

That’s it.
After 4+ years, a good number of triumphs and vastly more failures, I’ve defended my PhD!

For the occasion, I’d like to share a short piece about my experience as a PhD student that I originally wrote for a friend when she graduated. I recommend the original if you read Dutch.

Enjoy.
Or let me know how I’ve got it all wrong.
Whatever, it’s Dr. Urai for you now! Continue reading →

After four years of experimental design, data acquisition and analysis I just finished putting together everything into my PhD thesis. I did not find any templates that really worked for me (although classicthesis looks quite nice), so I put together my own set of random LaTex commands. I’m not a graphics designer but I’m quite happy with the end results – so here are the choices I made and the corresponding LaTex code. Continue reading →

Check out my answer to the question ‘does psychology need neuroscience?’, published in Spiegeloog magazine. If you don’t read Dutch, or are interested in hearing more about this topic, check out this episode of the UnsupervisedThinking podcast. Continue reading →

Three years after starting the project, two years after completing data collection and almost exactly one year after submitting the manuscript, the first paper of my PhD is now out! In this project, we investigated the relationship between pupil dilation, decision uncertainty and across-trial patterns of decisions.

When making decisions about the world, each choice is associated with a sense of uncertainty: the probability that a choice is correct or wrong, given all the available evidence. This quantity of decision uncertainty can be derived from a simple mathematical model. This model gives rise to a set of specific predictions (see top row of the figure). Based on previous work, we hypothesised that ascending brainstem systems, which release modulatory neurotransmitters such as dopamine and noradrenaline throughout the brain, may broadcast decision uncertainty signal across the brain. Continue reading →