Sohee Park will use prestigious Gutenberg Chair award to study the neuroscience of the bodily self
Over the next year, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair and Professor of Psychology Sohee Park will work to develop a novel approach to examine the nature of the body and the self in those with schizophrenia.
Park will be conducting this research as part of her Gutenberg Chair award. Established in 2007, the award aims to foster international scientific collaboration with the premier research institutes of France’s Alsace and Grand Est Region.
The award provides 60,000 euros as a grant and will facilitate a one-year research collaboration between Park and Anne Giersch, the deputy director of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research and head of the Translational Neuroscience and Psychiatry Unit at the University of Strasbourg. Park will also speak at seminars and lectures for specialists, as well as for a broader public.
“I feel very fortunate,” Park said. “The Gutenberg award allows me to continue collaborating with Professor Giersch on an ancient philosophical problem of reconciling the body and the self with the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience. This is also special for me as a Korean person. In Korea, everybody knows that metal moveable type printing was invented by us in 1377, when Jikji was printed using moveable bronze type. However, in the West, the first print using metal moveable type is attributed to Gutenberg in 1452. We need to rectify this! I am strangely pleased that the Gutenberg award found its way to a Korean academic.”
Through their project, Revisiting Schizophrenia through the Bodily Self in Space and Time, Park and Giersch bring complementary expertise to establish a novel research program that focuses on the spatial, temporal and affective mechanisms that underlie disturbances of the body and self.
“We never have to think about where the self is because the self always coincides with the body,” Park said. “You are always inside you, accumulating memories, experiences, looking out into the world from your spatial viewpoint while your body undergoes radical changes across your lifetime. However, fragmentation of the self and the body is central to schizophrenia—disruptions of the body and the self, such that you have an out-of-body experience or are unable to locate where yourself might be. From a clinical point of view, all psychiatric conditions may be construed as disrupted homeostasis between the self and the environment surrounding the self. With a better understanding of the nature of the body and self, we should be able to develop more effective strategies to work with self disorders.”
Park and her colleagues in Strasbourg hope to advance the eternal philosophical quest to understand the nature of the intricate relationship between the physical body and the psychological self.
“In addition to conducting the proposed research on temporal and spatial contributions to constructing our sense of self, we would like to build a foundation for a center for the study of the self and the body,” Park said. “We hope to bring the body back to the science of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy. For so long, we have neglected anything under the neck, but the physical body is central to the self. For psychiatric therapeutics, working on the body could yield effective outcomes.”