Over a four-hour period, four researchers who had never met before and were randomly assigned to groups were tasked with developing an interdisciplinary project. The team comprised a theoretical quantum physicist, a biomechanics researcher, a researcher from the Institute of Medicines, and Agata Krasny-Pacini from the STEP Psychiatry team at ITI Neurostra; the project “Personalised Proust’s Madeleine” won the audience’s favour by proposing connected nasal implants capable of delivering personalised odours that are either reassuring (vanilla) or “reconnecting” (chilli) during moments of emotional distress or dissociation, using single-case experimental (SCED) methodologies that were first randomly cross-matched and then piloted.
Beyond this exercise, which is far removed from the reality of interdisciplinary work where a project is built over four years rather than four hours, this day served to motivate us in our current – very real – interdisciplinary and inter-ITI projects underway at STEP and the Clémenceau University Rehabilitation Institute (Strasbourg).
