At age 11, when I first stepped foot into a pathology lab at the Syddansk Universitet, I was originally interested in molecular biology and pursuing stem cell research. Next year, when I entered college, I started off by majoring in Biochemistry, but one day I saw an ad in an elevator for the Neurobiology major, a competitive major that everybody was trying to get into. That was my first encounter with neuroscience.
I became curious about how the brain thinks, and realized that neuroscience is one of the most powerful fields because the brain governs the entire fabric of society and human behavior. Everything is connected to the brain.
I applied for the major and luckily, got in – since then, I’ve been fascinated by the brain and wanted to understand its mysteries. It’s a young field and to say that we’ve charted a small fraction of its vastness would be an overstatement. In my travels and speeches, I’ve been asked a lot of questions from all disciplines and directions, and all of them to some degree are traceable back to how the brain perceives the world.
Nowadays, I’ve gravitated toward the broad topics of how the brain learns through play and games and how the brain makes decisions and experiences the world, including these subtopics of neuroscience:
* neuroscience and games
* reward and motivation
* play, pleasure and emotions (affective neuroscience)
* how the brain learns
* decision making
* how the brain buys
* interactive design
* neuro-branding
* user and player experience
* addiction