Mind Brain Research (MBR)- Decision making in social contexts

formerly Center for Integrative Life Sciences (CILS)

Mind Brain Research is the structured postdoc-programm of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (formerly CILS). It brings together scientists from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities for basic and applied research on decision making in complex social environments.

Research Focus

One of the most distinctive features of humans is that they engage in complex social activities – activities that require intelligent decision making, that involve perspective taking, and that are guided by norms and conventions. Neuroscience and psychology have recently come up with fascinating new results that shed light on the cognitive and emotional abilities underlying human sociality, thus providing new insights in a field that used to be thought of as the domain of the humanities. The reverse is also true: Given that sociality has a decisive impact on cognitive and emotional development, the humanities and the social sciences are needed when neuroscientists try to understand the development of the human brain.

In June 2010, seven interdisciplinary projects in the field of decision making in complex social environments were initiated. These projects provide internationally renowned scholars, highly qualified postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students with an excellent research environment. Current faculty members come from a number of different disciplines, including cognitive science, ethnology, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. MBR thus stimulates efficient and strictly focused interdisciplinary exchange between neuroscience, social science and the humanities, in order to explain human activity in complex social environments.