My personal page (obsolete)
It is a good habit to start personal pages with a few sentences on how much you love your spouse and children, and how much quality time you spend with them. I am not going to do that. Not because I do not love them or spend good times with them - I do. It is just so boring to do that on a page like this.
Okay, to satisfy the curious (a little bit): have a look at my home website. That is all you are going to get. If you want to get to know us, just come and visit us some time. And remember: I do! Really!
Instead, I will present you with some of my other interests in life, including my research interests. I really like to eat and drink (mostly beer); I like to play volleybal; I participate in a webdesign and internet company; and if you can read through all that, I have put my research interests at the end of this page. And for those of you who are too impatient, or have too short an attention span, you can use the links below to jump to the various parts of this page.
Food and drinks
Volleybal
Internet
Research interests
Food and drinks
Well, I said I like to eat and drink. That does not imply that I also like to cook. I like to eat and drink, that's all. Food and drinks that others have prepared are by far my favorite! Cooking is boring, eating is fun!
Mediterranean food is my favorite. I like pizza, pasta, olives, fish dishes, risottos, souvlaki, and what have you. But also Dürum Döner, which is definitely mediterranean too. Japanese and other Asean food is also delicious. Dutch food is not so bad either, especially in the winter, contrary to what most people seem to think. Nothing wrong with Boerenkool met worst (kale with sausage), Rode kool met appels (red cabbage with apples), or Zuurkool met spek (sauerkraut with bacon)!
But above all, I like the company of others when I am eating. And share a couple of drinks. Although I enjoy wine, ouzo, whiskey, and cognac, my favorite drink is beer. And these are my favorite brands:
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Incidentally, in the summer of 2006 I was in in Plzeň, Czech, and on my birthday (July 11) I visited the Pilsener Urquell brewery (Plzeňský prazdroj). This is where the popular Pilsner (lager) beer got its name. Down in the (cool) cellars of the brewery, I took the following picture of the very barrel where the first Pilsner was ever brewed, in 1842. I named the picture "The root of all evil".
Food and drinks
Volleybal
Internet
Research interests
Volleybal
I am also a volleybal enthousiast, and have been playing volleybal for nearly 25 years. I started playing volleybal in my early twenties (much too late, of course) at the beginning of the 1980s, at a recreational level. I soon entered the official NeVoBo (Dutch volleybal association) competition, and played in all classes up to 1st class. Unfortunately, the decline in my performance has since long started, mostly due to a sore back, and I am currently playing 3rd class again. Oh well, still having fun though.
Over the years, I have had about all functions you can imagine in a sports club. The only aspect where I have never been responsible for is finance. And that is just as well. I am currently chairman of volleybal club Dunamis, a relatively small but very enjoyable club in Tilburg. Check out our website for more information:
Food and drinks
Volleybal
Internet
Research interests
Internet
The volleybal club asked me to set up and maintain a new website, together with Martin Stoop and Niels van Zuijlen. Martin is a teacher of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts, and a classical motor race enthousiast. Niels is working at the IT department of the National Police, and is a computer gaming addict. The three of us share the love for a good glass of beer...
So, we produced this website (see above), and still maintain it today. And we had a lot of fun doing it. Martin had been making catalogues for some artist friends of his, who wanted to display their work. These people started to want websites instead of printed catalogues, so he designed a few sites for them. Our 'threesome' worked so well for the volleybal site, that we decided to establish a webdesign and internet company in order to serve such clients.
The company, which we named NIMAGE (an acronym, of course) was formally established on June 17, 2005. Although our main focus is webdesign, we also offer website uptime monitoring (is my website still available?), website content monitoring (has the content of my website changed?), data backup solutions, web applications, and more. Go to our website for some examples:
Food and drinks
Volleybal
Internet
Research interests
My research interests
Very broadly, my research is driven by curiosity about the relationship between brain and behavior. Just how is the brain capable of producing and controlling human behavior? What are the consequences of brain damage for psychological functioning? In most of the research I am doing, I am trying to bring healthy human subjects into a certain psychological state, or ask them to perform various psychological tasks, while at the same time recording electrophysiological measures such as EEG (brain potentials) and EKG (heart rate).
At the moment, the number of projects that I am involved in is quite large, but here are the most important ones:
- Motor preparation and control: how do people prepare for and execute movements? Is there are fixed activity threshold in the brain that has to be exceeded before movements can be initiated? And if so, and the threshold has been crossed, is that final (a 'ballistic' stage)?
- Cognitive control: people are able to quickly and flexibly adapt their behavior to sudden changes in the environment. How does the brain handle that? How are we able to stop movements that already have been prepared and are well on their way to being executed? How does the brain cope with conflicting information about the movements to be executed (stimulus-response compatibility)?
- Error control: what happens when the brain detects errors before, during, or after task performance? For instance, when a response with the wrong hand is produced (the brain detects this immediately), or when feedback indicates that some other aspect of the response was erroneous (the brain detects this only after some time)?
- Clinical: How do motor preparation and control proceed in situations of damage to the nervous system? For instance, in patients with spinal cord lesions or patients with Parkinson's disease? And what about the case of minimally responsive patients, such as patients in a coma or vegetative state? Can we use electrophysiological measures to diagnose and possibly improve the clinical state of these patients?
- Methodology: how can electrophysiological measures be recorded with minimal contamination of artefacts? For instance, how can we get rid of the vexing eye movements arefacts, even when only a minimal amount of data is available, and when the signals of interest are located at the same brain regions as the artefacts? And how can we adequately summarize the enormous amount of data with the ever increasing number of electrodes available in present laboratories?
Even in these days of modern scanning techniques such as fMRI, I believe that electrophysiological measures deserve a lot of merit. They do not have the spatial resolution of the scanning techniques, but compensate that by a highly superior temporal resolution. However, I also believe that useful application of electrophysiological measures will increasingly require that much more information can be gathered from them than is presently the case. Therefore, I am currently initiating another research program in which I plan to make contributions in this regard.
In conclusion
So, there you have it. This is what drives me. Quite a simple life I lead, don't I? But call me crazy, but I happen to like it!