Meet the Curious Minds - Laura Kaltwasser
Meet the Curious Minds - Laura Kaltwasser
Interview by Lise Ninane
Michael Hauri & the Einstein Foundation Berlin
Laura Kaltwasser is a postdoc at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain where she investigates the development of sociocultural identity through an interdisciplinary approach. She has been working as scientific consultant for our BRAINPALACE project. On April 21, 2020, Laura was invited to give a talk as part of STATE Studio’s ArtScience Monthly #2. Following that evening, we wanted to deepen our understanding of her work and approach, and proposed to continue this exploration through an interview.
LN: For those who couldn’t be present at our ArtScience Monthly #2, could you tell us about your work?
LK: I´m currently in my first post-doctoral research with Prof. Vittorio Gallese, an Italian neuroscientist involved in the discovery of the mirror neuron system, which plays a crucial part in understanding processes like empathy, observational learning or sharing of movement patterns. My research project, which is funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin, focuses on the development of the social self, or more specifically socio-cultural identity.
Identity is a very broad construct that spans from philosophy over psychology to sociology and cultural studies. We are mainly focusing on empirical studies applying psychophysiological measurements. The signals that we are looking into is most of the time EEG data which measures the electrical activity of the brain, but also other physiological signals of the body such as heart rate variability, skin conductance and hormone levels. The theoretical concept clustering around them is the notion of the self.
Michael Hauri and the Einstein Foundation Berlin
LN: What kind of challenges do you encounter in your research practice? And what do you experience as a resource to overcome these difficulties?
LK: What is particularly difficult is to work at the interface between invisible aspects like psychological processes - which are very hard to measure because there is no clear signal -, and more concrete aspects - where there is some amplitude that can be measured on a specific electrode. Linking these more invisible, psychological processes with more material, physical processes is always a great challenge.
When it comes to the resources that I benefit from, I would mention team work and the interdisciplinary aspect. We are very lucky, at the Berlin School for Mind and Brain, to have very talented people from different disciplines, like philosophy, neuroscience or cognitive science. Our team is currently composed of 5-6 Master’s students and two Ph.D. students. There are also philosophers and psychologists. Our work benefits from the plurality of perspectives that we have on a particular phenomenon, like the self.
LN: Do you sometimes find inspiration for your research by turning yourself to the arts?
LK: Yes, totally. For example, at the moment, I’m part of a reading club: the Club of the Unreadable Books. We are currently reading A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust. This book is dealing a lot with the invisible processes of perception and dreaming.
For example, Proust describes the work of an artist, and explains how it is changing across time, across the objects that he chooses to portray, and also through the very process of how to perceive and make the invisible concrete. I feel that there are some parallels between the artistic and the scientific work in this manner.
LN: There is of course this very famous excerpt on the "madeleine": when the main character tastes this little cake together with his tea, he is suddenly immersed in a memory of his childhood.
LK: Yes, that’s a good example you give here. It is often taken to describe the formation of a memory from a neuroscientific perspective. The character's experience in the South of France with his grandmother is suddenly re-evoked decades later, triggered by the association of the same taste of a madeleine which has been dipped in and the smell of the tea. This is called multi-sensory integration in neuroscience. It seems to be a crucial aspect for vivid memory formation, partly taking place in the hippocampus which is interacting with various other brain regions. Proust’s famous Madeleine scene helps us to understand two contemporary theories of the self: the theory of multisensory integration allowing for the emergence of a (more implicit) bodily self and the theory of autobiographical episodes fostering the construction of a (more explicit) narrative self.
LN: In how far do you think that your personality appears through your research?
Michael Hauri and the Einstein Foundation Berlin
LK: Mmmh good question. I would say that I have always been very open to experiences and other perspectives. I’m exploring an interdisciplinary field, and this can sometimes be at the cost of being less powerful in terms of statistical effect sizes compared to “pure” physical neuroscience, where you have a lot of control over the visual stimuli that you apply.
I am scoring high in openness in various personality measures. This might be reflected in the fact that I choose topics that are rather diverse. I’m also scoring quite high on agreeableness. Choosing collective behavior as a topic… That might be a feature of mine pertaining to my social and agreeable side.
LN: You told me you are exploring a new topic of research, namely collective consciousness. Could you tell us more about it?
LK: To explore the notion of the collective consciousness, we need to go back to the idea of the collective unconscious. The construct of the collective unconscious arises from the work of Carl Gustav Jung, who mainly refers to figures as archetypes that appear in dreams and that are related to our mythology, history and culture. Importantly he was one of the first to state that the collective unconscious is shared among individuals of the same culture.
I’m curious to explore further the collective nature of dreams and visions by taking Jung’s idea from the unconscious to the conscious. Traditionally we refer to dream states while people are sleeping, whereas visions may arise in states of collective emotional experiences during socio-cultural practices.
Would you have an example of a project in which you explore this idea of collective consciousness?
I have been working on BRAINPALACE, a project at the interface of art and science which explores collective consciousness in the form of empathy. Here, dyads of participants can experience neural synchrony, as they are entering together into a state of empathy with one another, in the presence of an art installation combining light, movement and sound. As feelings of empathy and awe are elicited, collective consciousness may arise. This is also reflected in processes of neural coherence, which we can observe via the EEG brain waves of the participants. With BRAINPALACE, our main research questions concern individual features of the participants, features of the situation- like emotionality and their influence on collective experiences
In parallel, I am also conducting a research project, together with other neuroscientists, biologists and robotic engineers. We are working on understanding the basic principles of self-organization - that is, how individuals develop a sense of body ownership and agency. For now, we are still focusing on individual agentic decision-making, but hopefully soon, we will extend our research to self-organization in collective decision processes.
Michael Hauri and the Einstein Foundation Berlin
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