The things that attracted Jerker Rönnberg back then, 20 years ago, and that caused him to stay at Linköping University are the same as now.
“The department I belong to has been very open-minded, and LiU’s cross-disciplinary perspective suits my research”, says the newly crowned winner of the Swedish Hearing Research Prize, which is awarded by the Swedish Hearing Research Foundation every four years.
The ability to work across discipline boundaries is important for Jerker’s research. With one leg in medical science and the other in the social sciences, as professor of psychology he has brought together these two scientific fields and contributed to creating a new field, cognitive hearing science. This focusses on cognitive resources, such as the memory, in people who have problems with their hearing.
For a person with impaired hearing, memory plays an extremely large role. If a person with impaired hearing uses a lot of energy during a conversation to hear and understand what people are saying, it becomes difficult for the long-term memory to store the information. The person has a poorer memory of what was said.
“I became interested in how memory works when I was a teenager. It’s exciting that it it is possible to remember in so many different ways, from dreams to perfect memories. It’s also interesting that clues can help us recover memories. And remember, the memory and memory systems are what build up a personality”, says Jerker Rönnberg, sitting in his office at home in Ljungsbro, just outside Linköping. Outside the house, a new roof is being laid. Jerker warns that the noise can disturb how we hear each other during the interview.
“My interest in memory – my origin”
Jerker took his doctorate in the psychology of memory at Uppsala University in 1980. Or was it 1990? At the time, he was planning for a life as psychologist.
“Hold on a minute! I really must sort out this business with the decades. It must have been 1980. That was when Arne Risberg appeared, and changed everything.”
The white-haired “nestor” who approached Jerker after his thesis defence – who was at the time younger than Jerker is today – was Professor Arne Risberg from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. He wanted Jerker to help him write an application for a project on hearing and memory.
“That’s how hearing came into the picture.”
