Monika Schönauer

“Freud ruined it for everyone”

At a time when information is a tap away and the task of remembering dates and details can be delegated to digital devices, it can be all too easy to overlook the brain’s ability to handle memory. But for Dr. Monika Schönauer, junior professor and researcher at the University of
Freiburg’s Institute of Psychology, memory is the core of her work and research.

Schönauer, who joined the University of Freiburg early on in 2020, leads a team of researchers investigating the mechanisms of memory retention and how they are processed during sleep. Her research, which focuses on how stable memories are formed, offers new insights into how factors such as repetition impact long-term memory. “It’s been shown that there’s an active process that goes on during sleep that strengthens the memories that we’ve made. Sleep actively supports memory formation in the brain,” she explains. “When we’re asleep, we think the brain does nothing, but what it does is it reactivates those memory traces we’ve formed during the day. During sleep, our brain rehearses what we’ve done during wakefulness, and just like if we retrieve it while we’re awake, this actually helps us store this information in our long-term memory system and helps us remember for longer.” The easy flow of Schönauer’s explanations
is a clear testament to her expertise and enthusiasm for her research.

Research, for Schönauer, is “something that plays very well into my personality structure” as she enjoys working with data and collaborating with people who are equally excited about research.
She sees it as a process that blends both creativity and logic: “what comes first for me is the creative process and that is what I enjoy most about it. You can start to ask any question you are interested in and you have to be creative – is this a question I can answer with the methods I have available? But obviously,” she continues, “you have to be very meticulous and logical about testing the question and drawing the strongest conclusions you possibly can.” At the same time, Schönauer notes that the competition that exists within academia can sometimes add pressure and make it risky to pursue innovative ideas, “because if things don’t work out, it could be the end of your career or your tenure, or even the end of the career of the people who are working with you, training with you.”

That’s not to say some risks aren’t worth taking. For a long time, Schönauer was reluctant to delve into researching how dreams play into memory reactivation, primarily due to the reputation of dreams as a pseudo-science in the field of psychology. “Freud ruined it for everyone,” she says with a laugh. Yet, her students’ persistent interest in examining the function of dreams “somehow wore down my prejudice against doing it,” she says, chuckling, “and I thought, you know what? Why not.” The study that transpired yielded a rewarding outcome. “When we had a first look at the data,” she recalls, “it was very striking that it was actually true […] that there were situations where people dreamt about their daytime experiences.” “It’s a super, super cool feeling,” she says.

Schönauer’s passion for research has been present since the beginning of her academic journey. Though she initially enrolled in communication studies with aspirations of becoming a journalist, Schönauer soon switched her major to psychology upon finding courses like biological psychology and cognitive neuroscience more interesting. It was not long before she found herself a position as a research assistant with the neuroscience program at LMU Munich, and “that’s how I stumbled into my research field,” she says, grinning. “I still remember my first day was my birthday. I was super excited about it; it was perfect.” From there, Schönauer went on to receive her doctorate from LMU and subsequently embarked on postdoctoral positions in Tübingen and at Princeton University in the United States.

Schönauer attributes her time in the U.S. as playing an integral role in enhancing her awareness of gender equality in science and academia. “The more methods-heavy you get, the more ‘bro-y’ you feel it also is,” she remarks. As a result, implicit bias can become more prevalent, posing additional challenges for women compared to their male counterparts. Reflecting on her own experiences, Schönauer notes that she tends to face a greater likelihood of receiving overly critical, doubtful remarks when making suggestions or presenting computational methods. “I always had the impression that as a woman in Germany, I first have to prove that I can do what I do when I work in this field.” In contrast, she found the discourse on gender bias in the U.S. to be more robust, and her time at Princeton showed her “what it feels like once people take you seriously from the get-go.”

“It’s interesting, if you experience another culture, how it can also shift your own viewpoint” she muses. Schönauer’s upbringing by an independent mother fostered in her a strong belief in her ability to accomplish anything she set her mind to. She states, matter-of-factly, “I always learned that the boys should be copying from you.” Still, unconscious biases can make it difficult to bring women to the forefront. “Before I moved to the U.S., I had an idea that we make a photo wall of our science idols. And then we realized – there’s only men. And we thought, how is this possible? Who are the women?” She points out that “if our whole field behaves in a way that only men are the ones that get the keynotes and always talked about in the books, then things don’t change.” Thus, when it comes to encouraging change, Schönauer takes a proactive approach and leads by example: “When I do my lectures, I now note when the work was done by a female researcher,” she says. “I’m trying to reverse the bias.” In a field where undergraduate and graduate programs are largely comprised of female students, everyday representation can be impactful. “If you are 90% women in a study program, but all your professors are male, what does that tell you about becoming a professor?” asks Schönauer. She further emphasizes, “I think it would be harder for you to identify with the idea of being the researcher, or the teacher, or the scientist.”

Schönauer believes that normalizing and making a conscious effort to champion women scientists and academics can help foster a more inclusive and equitable environment in science and academia. After all, our understanding of the world is shaped through our experiences and
interactions, and “how our brain really experiences the world and files away its knowledge,” Schönauer says, “is very similar to how science works as a system.”