How did my education influence my career path?
For my DPhil, I returned to Oxford having developed a research project proposal on neural correlates of visuo-spatial attention. I arrived early during the Oxford Autumn School of Cognitive Neuroscience and bumped into one of my future DPhil supervisors, Matthew Rushworth, at coffee. He took four coins out of his pocket and asked my how many coins there were. This is an example of the so-called subitizing - for small numerosities we can give the exact number without having to count. He then said when he and Vincent Walsh looked at my CV, and no doubt also inspired by a popular science book that appeared this year (the Mathematical Brain by Brian Butterworth) they thought I might be interested to move into a new topic: Numerical Cognition. At that point I know nothing about Numerical Cognition and hadn't even known that this (at this point young) research area even existed. I would never have embarked on researching this without them. After Matthew's demonstration, I was immediately hooked and Numerical Cognition has been my passion ever since.
Fond memories of my time at EP
Impossible to just choose one so here are a few... Day 1 in the office as a new DPhil student and Prof Alan Cowey (FRS!) comes into the office, says 'call me Alan' and proceeds to search for a better computer monitor for me - I was totally flabbergasted. Not many days later Prof Dick Passingham drops by to give me a copy of a paper (remarkable on its own!), then says 'I doubt there are neurons responding to numerosity in the primate brain - good luck finding them'. Well, this was 1999 and 5 years before Nieder & Miller (2004) published their paper on neurones in the monkey parietal lobe responding to numbers…
I am eternally grateful to my DPhil supervisors who not only encouraged me to focus on Numerical Cognition as research area but who inspired me throughout my DPhil and pushed me when I was reluctant. I remember Matthew Rushworth coming to the office to make sure I'd attend the dinner with Prof Brian Butterworth. I was just a first year DPhil student and was very shy about attending a dinner with this person who would become my external DPhil examiner. Matthew had to nearly drag to the restaurant (he 'butter be worth it!').
Other reflections
In my final year while revising for exams, I remember being very struck by how bad my first year essays were. It made me realise how much I had developed and learned over the three years. I think this is so important to keep in mind, this scope we all have for self-development. Sometimes we look up and people far beyond us in our careers and think, 'I couldn't do that' and, in fact, we are probably right. But we are close to the next step and then, having learned more and honed our skills, we are ready for the next, and then the next, and so on.
