InCognito For all your study-related needs and feeds. March 2018 Suggestions, feedback or comments? Let us know at [email protected]. Internships so far: the good, the bad and the funny By Iris Proff What was your most surprising realization I have realized that science can give you about the scientific world so far? an exciting life, but you need to be Since a couple of weeks, all of us first years Science is sometimes seen as this patient to successfully deal with those swarmed out to various labs around fascinating process where we discover frustrating moments that come and go. Amsterdam to get some hands on experience lots about many interesting topics (for on scientific practice. Some of us spend our instance, the brain). In a sense, it is! ...but Andrea Lind days programming models or dive into the in the everyday, what we do is mostly Hi Andrea! What are you working on? world of data analysis. Others train rats, figuring out why things do not work the I take part in a project at the Social Brain torture humans to perform EEG way they should. So it's also a lot about Lab where we investigate empathy and experiments. Our daily routines might be learning life skills, I would say… prosocial learning. quite different, the struggles we face and realizations we make are actually pretty Mariana Duque Quintero What is the thing that surprised you most similar! I interviewed four MBCS students Hola Mariana! What do you do for your up to now? about their internships. internship? What surprised me most about the world I am doing an internship with the of science is the amount of ‘jacket on, Pierre Gianferrara Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience jacket off’ work involved in a research Hey Pierre! What project are you working on group from the UvA. My project is about project. For two straight weeks my main for your internship? identifying behavioral and neural task was to mechanically press 5 buttons My project is part of the Educational differences in the rat when it recognizes to upload videos to a survey, which Neuroscience research group at the VU, an object by tactile input, compared to honestly made me reconsider whether and the goal is to use Neuroscience when the rat also has visual cues. life in academia actually belongs on that research to inform educational practice. I intellectual pedestal. am running a “Multivariate Pattern What do you enjoy most about your daily Analysis” on fMRI data to identify patterns life in the lab? What do you enjoy most about your daily of neural activity that are related to the That everyday has its own challenges! life in the lab? encoding of visual scenes and their Sometimes is all about acquiring a new The days here are filled with loads of integration with past knowledge. The idea technical skill, others are about repeating coffee breaks and conversations between is that the neural encoding of the learned a procedure you already learned to obtain PostDocs, PIs, and students alike. Not associations may be different depending on data. One day I could spend a full only is such an atmosphere very chill the level of congruency, and we want to afternoon figuring out how to use certain because of the daily ping pong game after train a machine learning classifier on neural program, other day I could be writing a lunch – it also lets you share theoretical, data to predict the learning of congruent program myself. Every new step in this ethical and practical concerns and ideas versus incongruent associations based. project is intellectualy stimulating so you with great researchers from different never stop feeling as a learner. projects. In this sense, I have learned that What did you most struggle with so far? a good internship can give you access to a Since I am the only programmer in the What was your most surprising realization hub of experienced and talented people, Educational Neuroscience research group, I about the scientific world so far? from whom you might end up learning never have the packages that I need. So I've How much researchers need to be something you had never thought of. had to make friends with the people from everything at the same time! The artisan, the IT office to get everything to work. I've the electrician, the programmer, the Thanks for sharing your experiences in also run into compatibility issues with the creator, the critic... Every role that may be your internships so far! If you have a fun software I'm using, so I've had to learn a lot needed to address your research internship, know someone who does about computers, hardware and network question, but also to solve the little something really cool or fancy, let us know! management, which I did not expect to problems that come along with an Email [email protected] need, to be quite honest… experiment. Page 1 InCognito March 2018 The Weird Side of Pubmed: Neurobiology of Fetish By Linda Jolink Ever since I came across an internet article on people who went crazy for inflatable animals (imagine a grown man in a room full of plastic crocodiles, hornily rubbing against them), I have been wondering what happens in the brain of people with a sexual fetish. And you know how it goes: suddenly, it’s 2 AM, there’s thirty-five tabs on your screen with articles like “New Age of Eunuchs: Motivation and Rationale for Voluntary Castration”, and you sigh to yourself “I’m on the weird side of PubMed again...” What neurobiological mechanisms cause sexual fetishes? Let me start with some actual information. Papa rat needs his sex jacket Blame it on the opioids This article will gradually move into more Although foot fetishes may be caused In other rat studies, preference for weirdness as we proceed. The traditional by ‘accidental’ neural connections neutral scents and places was reliably definition of a fetish is ‘a (human-made) between spatially close regions, many accomplished through sexual object that is believed to have fetishes involve objects that are conditioning. A similarity between all supernatural powers over others’, such as processed far from the somatosensory studies is that rats are virgins before the a voodoo doll. Sexual fetishism, also cortex. How to explain assocations fetish associations are made, suggesting dubbed paraphilia, is a sexual fixation on a between, for example, leather and that the first sexual encounters form a nonliving object or nongenital body part. sexual arousal? The most obvious critical period for developing fetishes. Body part-related fetishes are focused on answer would be: through classical Neuropharmacological experiments feet in almost half of the cases, whereas conditioning. This could mean that if indicate that the sexual reward effect is object-related fetishes are often directed somehow, during your first experiences mediated by opioid receptor activation. towards clothing, particularly leather and with sex, you are always on a leather Endogenous opioids that are produced rubber. Wikipedia has a list of paraphilias couch, you may associate the smell of during sex may not only cause direct which contains brilliant scrabble words, leather with sex and develop an sexual pleasure, but also activate such as anthropophagolagnia (raping and unusual preference for leather. To test dopamine pathways that strenghten the then cannibalizing another person), the hypothesis of classical conditioning association with cues that reliably autoplushophilia (the image of one’s self in as a mechanism for fetish development, predict sexual reward (such as the the form of a plush or anthropomorphized the authors of an article with the feeling of the rodent jacket or the smell animal), formicophilia (being crawled on glorious name “Who, what, where, of leather). There is human evidence for by insects) and homeovestism (wearing when (and maybe even why)?” the conditioning theory too: after clothing emblematic of one’s own sex) developed a rat model of fetish. heterosexual men were repeatedly Effectively, the model entails that male shown pictures of a pair of boots We do not know much about what causes rats have to wear a ‘rodent jacket’ followed by pictures of sexy naked sexual fetishes. There is however a logical, everytime they mate with a female. women, their penises showed but unresearched theory about the high Indeed, when trained rats are significantly more blood flow (don’t ask prevalence of foot fetishes: on the primary presented to a female while they’re not about the methods) upon only seeing a somatosensory cortex, the feet lie right wearing the jacket, they show picture of boots. Thus, the researchers next to the genitals, in the most medial “dramatic copulatory deficits”. In a later said to have induced a “mild boot fetish” part of the postcentral gyrus. (unpublished*) study, the male rats in these men. (If you didn’t know this, it’s probably were again trained in the jacket, but because genitals are often left out of now in the test trial, the females were For dessert: Pubmed’s Weirdest homunculi!) the ones wearing the jacket. As https://doi.org/10.1016 .It is imaginable that occasional cross-over expected, the male rats copulated more /j.yhbeh.2011.02.001 connections may occur between the with jacket-wearing rat girls than with For this article, female rats were sexually subregions processing sensory “naked” female rats (“‘lingerie’ really conditioned to partner odours by clitoral information from the genitals and the feet, gets rodents in the mood”, in the words stimulation, which was done with a soft thus associating sexual arousal with feet. of Huffington Post). brush by the researcher.