Corinna's Bio

You already had the chance to read about the Cognitive Science studies in Osnabrueck, so I did the same bachelor there. Originally, I am from Potsdam, famous town next to the less famous Berlin ;]. I did my Bachelor thesis about cross-cultural facial emotion recognition, i.e. I had German as well as Japanese subjects (I did my semester abroad in Yokohama) look at lots of faces that showed emotions and wanted to know, if they there are differences in how these faces were assessed. I used eye tracking for that (and yes, there really seem to be differences ;]).

As for my real research interests, I always wanted to do sleep research and am yet not quite specialised in any subarea of that field, but at the moment I love to explore the theory of Giulio Tononi, who recently proposed a very smart new theory about how sleep might work. Hope, he's going to win the nobel prize soon :]! He also investigates in the question what consciousness is, generally spoken, but not in an philosophical manner, but in form of clever kind of informatic/math genious calculations ;) that establish some sort of default network in the brain that has to be at least activated to generate consciousness. Well, this is my second main interest, and I'd like to combine sleep and consciousness, especially because I think that there are so many things still undiscovered. People are always talking about memory consolidation and dreams are e.g. still a stepchild. But dreams might be a nice path to new insights in consciousness as well. However, first I have to win the nobel prize and with that reputation I might dare to work on that as well ;].

I am very happy, that my studies here in Amsterdam support these ambitions, because I'm learning all the relevant techniques I'll need. I'm going to do my internship at the Sleep & Cognition Department at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.

Hey, and well, since I also do have a life besides of that: I love to sing and dance, do Aikido, drink cocktails, dabble in water, and everything about Japan. If you wanna found a band, choir or anything similar, I'd participate ;].

PS: I was advised to make advertisement wherever possible: I'm still looking for something to live close to uni. Amstelveen sucks ;P. So if you know someone that knows somebody who heard that...