One of our graduates talks about her experiences and the reason she chose to do a masters in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience at the School of Psychology.
Title: Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neurosciences MRes (follow for video)
Duration: 5.07 mins
Speaker Names (if given): S1 Charlotte - graduate
S1 I did an MRes in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience. I did that in particular because I'd studied my first degree in Psychology and I really wanted to do something that was more brain-based so particularly I was interested in social neuroscience. So that's where we would look at the questions that were asked in social psychology but we apply neuroscience methods to asking those questions. So, the Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience masters was appropriate for me. It's a year-long programme whereby I was using Functional Magnetic resonance Imaging and some Diffusion Tensor Imaging. So, two different types of neuroimaging methods to look at how the brain works when we are doing social tasks.
The MRes was fantastic for me because it covered a lot of different aspects of cognitive neuroscience. In terms of things like programming, which people perhaps don't realise that's very important to be able to actually write computer programs to display stimuli to have experiments that you can actually analyse so in terms of extracting the data we need to write programs for that. Also in terms of data analysis, analysing neuroimaging data is quite complex, so it covered that in some considerable detail. Neuroanatomy - actually to be able to study the brain we need to understand how the brain is made up, so it also covered that. So, it was a very good, very in-depth MRes and really helped to set me up for doing the PhD that I'm doing now which is in Social neuroscience.
The MRes actually has three research placements that we take part in. For myself, I followed a logical progression with those. So the first one was about training in terms of how to look at neuroimaging data because I knew that for my large research placement which is right at the end, the one that you write up for your masters dissertation I knew that I was going to do a neuroimaging experiment. So I thought start off by learning how to analyse some data. For my second placement I did some behavioural test, some pilot work for the final neuroimaging experiment that I was going to do. We got in several participants, designed an experiment, tested them, checked that we got the behavioural effects that we were expecting.
For the final research placement that I did which is what I based my final masters dissertation on was a neuroimaging experiment where we had 20 participants. We scanned them doing a theory of mind task, we tried to basically look at the brain regions that were involved in something called ‘belief desire reasoning’. How people attribute specific mental states to an external agent. For me that was really enjoyable to do but I wouldn't have been able to do that without doing those earlier research placements so it had a good logical progression for me. I found that I was able to a full project and have plenty to write about for my masters dissertation.
Birmingham is fortunate in that we've got the facilities to look at social neuroscience. So we have the scanner, we've got the TMS equipment, we have eye-trackers, EEG - a real array of equipment that we can use so it was an easy decision for me to apply to Birmingham and with the help of my supervisors to secure the funding it was no difficulty in choosing. You are encouraged to do a little bit of teaching assistant work. You can help with undergraduate teaching, get involved in things like doing small group seminars, marking. If you're interested in doing a career in academia that's very good experience to get. But also in terms of your own learning it really helps you to develop your own skills and it's also really enjoyable to work with people who are doing a degree who, just like yourself, are trying to find their way while they were doing their first degree. So definitely take as much as you can but also don't be afraid to go and ask for opportunity and make your own opportunity as well as taking everything that's on offer.
So, doing the MRes gave me an initial year where I could learn those skills that you wouldn’t necessarily have from your undergraduate degree. It enabled me to hit the ground running with doing my PhD. So, as soon as I started I knew exactly what I was looking at. I had a really good grounding in neuroimaging so that I was able to go on get straight into my PhD which, in the long run, should mean that I will finish on time. For people who are being funded, people who are funding themselves it's very, very important that you finish on time.
In terms of what I hope to do (although it wasn't my initial plan) I hope to stay in academia and continue my research. I found that, actually, research is something that I am really passionate about. I love working with people coming in day-to-day. I love the fact that we are able to look at the living brain. I still find that an absolutely marvellous feat that we can see the brain in action. So for me to be able to do that for the rest of my life and stay doing research and working with all these wonderful people and helping to understand this most fascinatingly complex organ that we have is a dream for me. So hopefully the things that I've done at Birmingham will help me to do that.
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