"We are, therefore, not conscious of neural activity, but rather conscious with it.

"

Developing an understanding of our brain, at least for me, is just as important as understanding
the reason of our existence.

I got acquainted with the exciting field of cognitive neuroscience during one of my clients'
project for their marketing communication initiative. Frisking through data for fundamental
triggers of human behaviour, I came across the applied field of cognitive neuroscience i.e.
neuro-marketing. Yet, to broaden my knowledge I read books by Gazzaniga, Stanislas
Dehaene, and Oliver Sacks and realized the myriad questions still unanswered, waiting to be
solved in order to understand the cognitive brain.

Currently, I am pursuing MSc. Psychology (Conversion) from the University of Stirling to

explore the science of psychology in more depth and to enhance my theoretical understanding
of human behaviour while gaining both cognitive research skills and especially, profound
experience of working with EEG as a brain activity measuring tool. The next plausible step
would be further specialization in the field of cognitive neuroscience i.e. to widen the concepts
of the experimental as well as the theoretical aspect of the neural correlates of the human
behaviour of both healthy and brain-damaged humans.

As far as experience is concerned, I am currently placed as a research assistant in the Cognitive

Laboratory of the University of Stirling. This is providing me an opportunity to gain the skill
set of a cognitive neuroscientist. Thus, I am being trained in collecting, analysing (MATLAB)
and reporting time-series data using mobile EEG (MoBI) in a real-world experiment.

The research question for my master’s Dissertation, is whether ‘Early visual processing is
affected by motor interference in the real world’. An interesting finding of a previous study
gave me the fodder for my dissertation topic. In this study, investigating the modulation of
attentional processing during real-world locomotion in the auditory modality, motion was
found as a main factor reducing P300 ERP amplitude. This decrease of P300 ERP amplitude
indicates that less attentional resources have been deployed towards the performance of the
primary task. This finding suggests that motion leads to a reallocation of attentional resources
to match the processing demands imposed by the continuous input of sensory information. In
the previous study, the act of walking only had a moderate impact on P300 amplitude. Based
on these previous findings, it is therefore expected that both factors may have an impact on the
processing of visual information. Due to the prominent role of visual information in guiding
human locomotion, a different pattern of results may be observed across conditions reflecting
differences in the way visual processing and aspects of locomotion interact.

Given the opportunity not only would this experience provide me with an environment where
world-class training and mentorship is maintained by leading researchers and research facilities
but also help me to further unlock my current potential and mould it into that characteristic of
a Ph.D. student.