Susanne and her bio

Well, then I am the next.

My name is Susanne Löhne and currently I am enrolled in the Master's programme "Brain and Cognitive Sciences" in the track "Cognitive Sciences". I am 23 years old and from Germany (from a nice, but small town named Freyburg). Before this Master's I studied Cognitive Sciences in Osnabrück. There I concentrated on philosophy, linguistics and neuroinformatics, but besides that I also had foundational classes in maths and computer sciences, neurobiology and cognitive psychology, logics and statistics, and of course in AI. I have to enumerate this that way, because I always have a problem to build up an hierarchy for all the fields that form cognitive sciences and -which might be more interesting here- I have a problem to formulate a hierarchy of interests in those fields for myself. I feel that the most interesting thing to do for me in this fields is to combine all of them.
That's why I also choose this track: I am quite interested in combining different results of different research fields. Of course the research fields should be connected to human cognition, although I am not sure anymore after all this studying, if this means exclusivley to just study the brain. For me cognition doesn't stop beyond the brain and it is not limited to brain processes. "The brain has a body" (Chiel & Beer, 1997, can be accessed via UvA) and is embedded in an environment and social context. As you might guess my faviourite research paradigm is thus that of embedded, embodied cognition and the scientists associated with this paradigm are quite cool for me. It is a broad field with ample scope for research, that I could do.
Other things I am really interested in are cybernetics (for example by Heinz von Foerster) and ethics (for instance by Aristotle, Kant and Fromm). I have the feeling that this fits well with my wish to combine fields, because all of those interests assume something like an onlooker perspective.
Personally I like to learn languages and to analyse them, but this passion is just a hobby and couldn't move me to study pure linguistics and philology.
As for my future I am open to what comes. I am sure the internships, which I want to use to try out different kinds of research methods, will ground what I am going to do after this two years.

And now for something completely different...